


Something Eternal

by EntameWitchLulu



Category: Mawaru Penguindrum, Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena, さらざんまい | Sarazanmai (Anime), ユリ熊嵐 | Yuri Kuma Arashi
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Heroine's Journey, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Introspection, Post-Canon, References to Canon, no actual noncon but we reference the canon and that shit happened in canon so yeah
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-07 18:43:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 30,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20822048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EntameWitchLulu/pseuds/EntameWitchLulu
Summary: Anthy leaves.Making Ohtori a memory will be more difficult than she wants it to be. And Tenjo Utena is a difficult person to find.But still. Anthy leaves.And the world outside the egg's shell spreads out before her. Promising perhaps, something eternal.





	1. Her Exit

**Author's Note:**

> Hello and welcome to a much bigger project than i should have ever made for myself lol.
> 
> Let me begin with a brief disclaimer that I believe Ikuhara's directorial works are ridiculously open to interpretation and different understandings, and none of it was ever supposed to be a cohesive world with concrete rules for worldbuilding. I have taken my own stance on some things, and I'm sure that we won't agree on all of my interpretations, all of my worldbuilding decisions, or all of my characterizations and thoughts. That's ok! I love these shows because it is so open to a thousand different conceptualizations. But keep that in mind, that whatever I say here is just that: my own interpretations. The messages and meanings that you take from the original canon, or from this particular work, are your own.
> 
> But mostly, I just wanted an excuse to mash all four of these shows together! I hope you'll enjoy this crossover, and I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts. Thank you, and enjoy!

The threshold has never looked so inviting, and so terrifying.

It has never looked so  _ close. _

She stops. Her toes meet right at the edge, lined up with split in the cobbled stones that marks the end, or perhaps, the beginning. The line between here and now. Between there and here.

Between the world, and her.

The city glitters in the sunlight — from where she stands, she feels for one, giddy moment, as though she can see the entire world. The sky stretches forever, so blue and clear and endless. Endless alabaster buildings glow in the spring sun. 

Has it always looking so welcoming?

Has it always looked so terrifying?

She cannot remember ever letting herself look.

She breathes in, once, deep, swelling up her lungs with the breath of the city beyond the gate. So close. So far away. All it would take is for the gates to swing shut in front of her. She knows that’s all it would take. She might give up. Turn around. If she looks over her shoulder, back at the world she is leaving, she might not turn back to the road before her.

At her feet, Chuchu stops where she does, right at the line between the past and the future. With his pack on his back, as big as he is, he looks as though he might topple over backwards. She carries only a suitcase, but it feels like a weight against her back. A weight that, if she shifts the wrong way, might carry her backwards — might wench her back into the world behind her.

Himemiya Anthy stares at the sky, at the sunlight across the city, and feels the heat on her face for the first time in her life. Let it be enough to carry her forward, into the light.

Chuchu squeaks. Perhaps it’s a question. She has one herself, wondering why she’s waiting. Why she hasn’t stepped over the line yet. Chuchu squeaks again. She feels his tiny legs against her own, scrambling up to the hem of her skirt, hopping then onto her suitcase. He is almost heavier than the suitcase is.

Is this truly all she has to bring with her? Only this suitcase, as light as air?

Of course it is. There is nothing here she wants to, or can, take with her.

The case is filled only with her convictions, and she takes care not to drop them.

Chuchu scrambles up her arm, and reaches her shoulder. He squeaks a third time, this time into her ear. This stirs her. She tightens her grip on her suitcase. Why is she waiting? Why does she feel as though she’s straining to hear footsteps behind her? Straining to hear a voice calling for her — asking her to turn around — to stay?

If she hears such a voice, she knows. She’ll look over her shoulder. She’ll see what she leaves behind her, and she will lose it. The sun dips behind a cloud, and for a moment, she is in the dark.

She can’t lose it. But her convictions are so light in her hand. They are not quite heavy enough, she thinks, to drag her across the threshold should the chains behind her snap tight from his voice again. They are not quite pulled tight enough to pull her back from the black hole behind her if she should turn back to look at it. For a moment, her breath catches. For a moment, she is afraid.

The sun returns, the heat striking her cheekbones, and the warmth returning to her. She feels it, for a moment, like a hand against her cheek. Her lungs fill once again.

_ Don’t be afraid of this world where we can meet. _

Her convictions grow heavy in her hand. She closes her eyes, and breathes in.

It’s enough.

She swings her suitcase forward, and it’s enough. The weight pulls her over the threshold. One step. Then another. Then another, and another, and another, and another — 

Every single step, one step closer.

_ One step closer to you _ .

Behind her, in the wake of her flight, Ohtori Academy disappears. If it was ever truly there at all.


	2. Out Here, There Are Only Stories

No one told her how bright the world is.

Anthy holds one hand up to the sun, squinting through the blinding light. It is so bright that she can hardly make out the people or the buildings — everything looks the exact same shade of brilliant white or silhouetted black.

It’s a city that Anthy does not know. Her heart pounds in her chest from her flight, but now that the weight of her convictions has dragged her this far...

She doesn’t know where she is. She doesn’t know where to go.

She’s never seen this world in her life, and for the first time, she realizes that she is completely, utterly lost.

Her legs tremble beneath her. She has never run as much as she did just then, and her body is not responding. It is hard to breathe. Ghost pains claw at her insides, and for one terrible moment, she is punctured with all the Swords of Hatred again, and her body is screaming and begging to be allowed to die — 

Chuchu shrieks in her face, scampering up and down across her forehead, tail lashing with agitation. Anthy opens her eyes, and finds that she is lying on the ground. She doesn’t remember falling. Her body still screams on the inside, but it’s dull, now, a distant hum. Almost separate from her. Separate enough that she can force herself to stand.

She has not left the unfamiliar street. 

She sits up, and stares. Her convictions lay, still safely nestled, within her suitcase. But she can hardly bring herself to reach for the handle. Can hardly bring herself not to sink her face into her hands, to get her eyes away from the bright lights she is not equipped or used to seeing, the streets that are unfamiliar to her, the world that twists and turns in ways that she no longer knows how to predict or navigate.

Where is she supposed to go?

And how on earth is she supposed to find Utena?

“Have you heard?”

“Have you heard?”

“Extra, extra~”

The voices are somehow different than the quiet, distant rumble of voices in cafes and shops, from the people who speak into cell phones as they move down sidewalks through the early morning. It occurs to her, then, that not a single person has noticed her. Not a single one looked up to see her fall. 

Is she still no more than a ghost? Does she truly not belong to this world outside of the egg she rotted away in? Is a part of her still there? Or worse, is all of her still inside, and this is only yet another dream?

“Once upon a time years and years ago, there was a little princess, and she was very sad, for her mother and father had died.”

The voice again. It rings clear and solid in this suddenly fragmented, blurring world. Anthy’s lips part, and her eyes search. Chuchu nibbles on a cracker.

Her eyes finally lift to the wall beside her. Against it, there are..shadows. The shadows of three girls, one in a large, poofy dress, and the others in what seems to be the silhouette of Ohtori’s uniform. It makes her chest tighten for a moment.

Her eyes flicker to the street, searching for the girls who cast the shadows. Instead, she sees only the three same shadows again, cast long and spindly across the ground from the feet of the shadows on the wall — as though the shadows themselves are casting shadows.

“Before the princess appeared a traveling prince riding upon a white horse~

One of the two girl-shadows disappeared, and reappeared, this time clad in the silhouette of a poofy prince’s outfit and crown and riding on a stick horse.

“The prince wrapped the princess in a rose-scented embrace...”

“Stop.”

The word rips out of Anthy’s throat before she can stop it, but her hands are shaking, and her throat closes up after the fleeing word.

The shadows all take pause. The girl playing the prince, in midstep when Anthy spoke, yelps as she appears to trip over her shoelaces, and tumbles face first onto the ground.

“Is that supposed to be a regal bearing?” says one of the voices, through shadows have no mouths for Anthy to tell which is speaking.

“Oy, oy, oy, we’re in the middle of a performance!” the girl in the princess dress throws up her hands.

“I’ve heard this story before,” Anthy says, her voice thin and choked. “I don’t want to hear it again.”

For a moment, the shadow girls do not respond. Then one of them sneezes.

“Well, we haven’t rehearsed anything else,” one says. “Unless you’re looking for improv. Are you interested in improv?”

She almost sounds hopeful, but Anthy only feels dizzy. She doesn’t know where she is. Or who she’s talking to. (She feels as though she’s met these girls once before, but their faces are fuzzy in her memory, as though she never actually saw them.)

And she doesn’t know how to find Utena. 

She picks herself up, dusts off her knees. She reaches for her suitcase. It is featherlight once again in her hands, and she doesn’t like it. It feels as though it might fly away into the sky after her.

“I’m not looking for a story,” she says. “I’m done with stories.”

“Well that’s too bad,” says one of the shadows. “Because the stories aren’t done with you.”

Anthy’s chest turns into a vice against her heart, and she chokes on her air. She can feel it, for a moment — the ghostly breath of Ohtori against the back of her neck. As though if she turns around, she’ll find she’s still at the gate. That she never ran. That she’s still there — hesitating.

“Once upon a time, there was a girl who disappeared,” one of the girls begins. “A girl who slipped away through a crack in the world’s shell, and was never seen again.”

Anthy’s breath catches, and the ghost breath of Ohtori fades as her head snaps up towards the girls. Utena.

They’re talking about Utena.

She steps forward, towards the shadows on the wall. There is something in the air, she thinks. Something much like the scent of roses.

“Who..._ are _you?” she whispers.

One shadow bends her knees and throws her arms into the air.

“We’re princes,” she says.

“We’re princesses,” says the second, beginning to spin in a pirouette.

“We’re witches,” says the third, sliding her feet backwards so that it looks as though she’s walking forward, even though she’s moving backwards.

“We’re space aliens.”

“We lay eggs — too late, or not enough of them.”

“We’re sisters and siblings.”

“We’re roses.”

“We’re cows.”

“We’re stories and storytellers.”

The middle shadow takes a deep bow, and appears to extend a hand towards Anthy.

“In short, Himemiya Anthy, we’re actors.”

All three of them strike a pose, the middle one with her arms in the air, and the two on the end taking a knee to spread their arms out towards the middle one. They hold there for a moment, as though waiting for applause.

“Ohh, that came out nice,” one of them says, clapping her hands with delight as she comes out of her pose. “You know, we didn’t even plan or practice that.”

“Do you always speak in riddles?” Anthy asks, shaking her head slowly.

The girls each take a new pose, this time with the two on the ends turning the other direction, bowing their heads as though praying, while the middle drops to one knee and spreads her arms out on either side of her.

“We speak in stage! We’re stories, Himemiya Anthy. And so are you.”

The sun edges a little further in the sky, and the shadows grow deeper. All at once, the cheery, silly nature of their acting seems to simply ebb away. The middle shadow stands back up, and despite having no eyes, Anthy feels as though she’s looking straight at her.

“You know my name,” Anthy says. “You’re the Ohtori girls who told the story of the Rose. In the play.”

“We might have been.”

“We’re a lot of things.”

“We dip our toes in a little of everything.”

“Of course we know you.”

“It’s good to know whose house you’re staying in, after all.”

Anthy thought she knew every bit of Ohtori. Ohtori had been a world that she had crafted, under Akio’s intent, keeping careful track of every soul that entered, and every soul that tried to leave — and whether she would let them. She remembers these girls, and their play.

But somehow, she doesn’t remember where they came from, and how they fit into her world.

“Were you from Ohtori?” she asks. “Somehow, I don’t remember where...how you were a part of it.”

“We go a lot of places.”

“We belong to none of them and all of them.”

“We come from between places and outside of them.”

“Who knows where that begins or ends, or where _ we _ begin or end?”

“Stories are stories after all.”

“And stories have to be told.”

Anthy’s stomach twists, and she feels again the ghosts of Ohtori, the ghosts of the swords, beginning to swell inside of her. She pulls her suitcase to her chest, and tries to breathe.

“I don’t understand,” she said, and her voice cracks as it leaves her. It hurts to admit it. She doesn’t understand.

She always thought she understood everything. She understood Ohtori, and everyone within it. She understood the tremors of others’ hearts, and how to play them. She understood the depth of her own brokenness, and that it could never be fixed. She understood her place in the world. She accepted it, lived it, until it shattered, and she didn’t know it anymore.

But out here?

Out here, nothing makes sense.

Out here, she knows nothing.

She barely knows how to breathe, how to stand. Even less does she understand herself.

“You’re going to understand even less.”

“Stories rarely make sense while you’re telling them.”

“Or while you’re living them.”

“You spoke of Utena,” Anthy says, desperately. “Do you know where she is?”

“Hard to say.”

“Who knows?”

“That story hasn’t been told yet. It isn’t a part of us.”

Anthy’s eyes fill suddenly with tears. She hadn’t cried in centuries, not before Utena. But now, it feels as though it is all she can do. Tears roll down her cheeks, one after another. She feels Chuchu leave up onto her suitcase, scramble up to her shoulder, and start to paw at the tears with his tail.

“But then,” she gasps. “Where do I go?”

A cloud begins to draw over the sun. One of the shadow girls disappears from sight as the shadow swallows her. Anthy leaps forward. She grips a hand against the brick, but even though the shadow is right between her fingers, she feels nothing. The cloud begins to swallow up the middle girl.

“Wait!” she gasps. “If you’ve been to other places, please — tell me at least where I should start!”

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what to do without someone telling her. Oh god, what was she thinking? She can’t survive out here. She doesn’t know where to go, what to do, how to live, she’s falling apart and she has no idea how to hold herself together — 

“You’ve already started,” the shadow girl says. 

The middle one disappears, and only the last remains, as the cloud continues to pull across the sun.

“You started when you took your first step,” the last shadow says, voice fading as she disappears. “And once a story starts, there’s only one direction to go — forward.”

The girls are gone. And when the cloud continues past, releasing the sun once again, the wall is clear of shadows and girls and stories.

Anthy stands stock still for a moment, her hand still pressed against the brick. It’s warm beneath her fingers. She trails the pads of her fingers against the rough surface. Her hand falls back to her side.

Chuchu lets out an inquisitive squeak. She reaches up for him to pat him on the head. He’s worried for her. She tries to smile to reassure him.

“The only way to go is forward,” she whispers to herself.

Fear still eats at her insides. She’s so afraid she can hardly take a step. But she inhales. She exhales. She still has no clues. No idea where to go. But...

The only thing to do is keep walking. Away from Ohtori.

Perhaps, if she keeps moving forward, she’ll find that Utena is only a little ways ahead of her.


	3. Move On, Already

The city seems to go on forever.

At first, Anthy takes the advice of the shadow girls. She goes forward. Never back. She walks straight onwards, following the length of the street. She walks past people who don’t seem to see her, and some who do. Lovely scents drift out of open air cafes, and pretty dresses on unseeing mannequins stare at her from window fronts. She speaks to no one. Looks at no one. If she looks too hard at the people around her, she’ll remember that she doesn’t know them, or this world, and she’ll find herself lost again. As long as she _ only _ moves forward, and never turns around...

But everything looks the same, and yet different and indescribable. Her eyes blur at the scenery, and the light is so bright she can hardly stand it. Finally, Chuchu runs out of crackers. Finally, Anthy decides to stop walking. Finally, she decides to look.

Not behind her — not yet, that direction is too much to look at — but beside her, at the very least. Her feet ache, and her soles are rubbed raw in her shoes. She has never walked so far, and yet not far at all.

Beside her, there is a cafe — an open air patio, with tall umbrellas over polished tables. Her stomach growls and she remembers the inconvenient truth of eating. For a while, she’d started to fool herself into believing she wasn’t the kind of person who needed it.

She sits down at a table, and rests her aching feet. Chuchu begins busily stacking the packs of sugar, tail curling and uncurling.

She doesn’t remember ordering, or paying, or even seeing a waiter, but one way or another, a warm cup of tea appears in front of her, and she cups it against her hands. Despite the heat of the world around her, there is something comforting about it. She closes her eyes, and inhales the scent of roses. Despite everything, it feels comforting. She finds herself melting into her seat, into the scent, into the warm memory of an uncomplicated, quiet rose garden. The flowers never judged her. Never spoke to her. Never asked anything of her, but for water and soil and gentle hands.

When she finishes her tea, there’s another already waiting. The roses are warm, and she takes the next cup and drink in the scent of that one, too.

She’s forgotten the pain in her feet, and how long she’s been here, by the time she puts yet another cup — how many? — down. All she can think about are her roses. The roses she left behind. Would they get enough water? Enough sun? Enough care, without her? She left them all behind. And her animals — she left her animals. She...she needs to go back. Just for them. Just for a moment. She can go back.

A hand lands on her table, making the cup shake against its saucer.

“You’re _ still _ here?”

The voice isn’t what surprises her — it’s the familiarity of it.

Anthy looks up, and finds Kiryuu Nanami glowering down at her. Anthy’s lips part. This must be an illusion. A hallucination. How would Nanami be here? How would she have left Ohtori? And so soon after Anthy?

But Nanami has the same look, the same glowering, irritable expression, the same...everything.

Almost, Anthy realizes. Almost everything is the same. Nanami does not wear Ohtori’s uniform — nor is she wearing the duelist’s garb her brother gave her. Instead she’s wearing a sundress — a bright, yellow floral that hangs off one shoulder, flouncing around her legs. 

Without asking, Nanami yanks the chair out from across Anthy, and flops into the seat, as though this is her cafe. She plants one elbow onto the table and her chin onto her hand. Not once do her glowering eyes leave Anthy’s.

Anthy can only stare, and for once, she finds her brain entirely empty.

“What are you doing here?” finally tumbles from her lips.

Nanami rolls her eyes.

“Do you really think you were the only one to notice there was a way out?”

Anthy closes her mouth, and tries to understand the strange sense of roiling emotions in her head. Somehow, she realizes, she did. She _ did _ think that no one else would ever try to leave that labyrinthine garden of that school. She _ did _think that those lost souls would all remain there, as long as Anthy had, at the very least. It had taken her so long to find her way free. She can’t imagine how someone else might.

Nanami drums her free hand against the table.

“But more importantly,” she says, letting her other hand fall against the table with a slap. _ “You’re _ still here.”

Anthy’s lips part. Then she tilts her head.

“What do you mean, still here?”

“Still _ here _! Still in this city! You’re not far, far away! How many times do I need to find a way to say it?”

Nanami throws her hands into the air. She shakes her head with a wild irritation, and slaps the table again.

“I thought you’d be all the way on the other side of the universe! But you’re still here! You’re still lingering!”

“So are you,” Anthy points out.

“Not the point! I only _ just _left. You’ve been gone for ages.”

This takes Anthy aback. Ages? How long is ages? Uncertainty once again seizes her, as she realizes once again how she does not understand as much as she thinks she understands — not even about the world she once controlled — or perhaps, the one that once controlled her.

“Are you listening to me?” Nanami demands, this time slapping both hands against the table.

Anthy stirs, and shakes her head slightly. She tilts her head again at Nanami, considering her.

“Why are you here?” she asks. “Why are you...stopping for me?”

Nanami rolls her eyes.

“Because,” she says, “I’m not like _ you _.”

The way she says it comes out like venom, and yet, it makes Anthy smile. The sight of that seems to take Nanami aback, her shoulders slumping and her irritation sloughing off to surprise instead. She blinks rapidly.

“What’s so funny?” she finally demands.

Anthy realizes, then, that she’s begun to laugh. She cannot remember the last time she laughed like this. Her body curls over itself against the table, shoulders shaking, and her hair sliding over her shoulders. Nanami stands up with her hands slammed onto the table.

“Hey!” she says. “What’s so funny?”

Anthy tries to get ahold of herself. Her vision is blurred from the tears of laughter, and she feels — light.

“You have a way of making me smile,” she finally manages to get out, still giggling.

This makes Nanami’s eyes get wide. She stands stock still for a moment. Then she slides into a chair, leaning back against it, still staring and blinking with utter confusion. Anthy tries to restrain herself from giggling again, wiping away at the tears.

“I’m telling the truth,” she says. “In all the years I was there — Nanami-san, you were always the most fun.”

She remembers the first time she became aware of Kiryuu Nanami. Oh, of course she had known the girl was there, within the sphere of hers and Akio’s influence. She knew of everyone within their range of affectation. Akio had kept an eye on the Kiryuu family, Touga, in particular, since he was young. He had been growing into the fake sort of prince that would be easy to use in the game. Nanami herself, then, was of interest by proxy — but only by proxy. At least, until that party.

Anthy does not remember the party itself with much fondness. Crowds, and people staring...they remind her of things she would rather not recall.

But Nanami’s prank? That was perhaps, one of the most amusing ways of trying to mess with her she’d ever experienced. It spoke of some brand of childish cunning that Anthy couldn’t remember having faced in any other part of the game ever before.

“You never make any sense at all,” Nanami says, finally. “You’ve never made sense, but now, you make less!”

Anthy smiles. She leans back in her chair, folding her hands in her lap.

“I saw a lot of myself in you once, you know,” she says.

Nanami scowls.

“I already told you,” she snaps. “I’m _ nothing _ like you.”

Anthy smiles.

“And that’s good,” she says, softly. “I didn’t want you to be.”

She doesn’t remember when her quiet, behind the scenes teasing of the girl who’d gotten the better of her once had turned into something else. Doesn’t remember when the games of cowbells and mystery eggs turned into something more urgent. Something more desperate. A quiet, crafted plea for Nanami not to follow the path that Anthy saw might spread before her — a path that Anthy had taken once.

“Did you think I named my animals after you because I hated you?” Anthy asks.

Nanami raises an eyebrow.

“Of course,” she says.

Anthy smiles once again, closing her eyes.

“Well,” she says. “I’m glad, at least.”

Nanami looks like she wants to ask what Anthy is glad for when Anthy opens her eyes. Anthy reaches for Chuchu, scratching him under the chin. He is covered in sugar from a packet that seems to have exploded on him, but he closes his eyes and hums when she finds a nice spot.

“Well,” Nanami says with a huff, folding her arms. “I hope you know that _ I _ still hate _ you _.”

Anthy can’t help but continue to smile, and she does not remember how long it’s been since she’s smiled so much. Perhaps she never has.

“That’s all right,” she says. “But thank you for taking care of Chuchu.”

“Huh?” Nanami eyes Chuchu, who turns to stare at her with his big, unblinking eyes. She shivers. “I’ve never taken care of that thing in my life — and I never will.”

Anthy thinks of mystery eggs left in girls’ beds, and swallows a private laugh for later. She shakes her head, still smiling, as she considers the Nanami before her. Perhaps, she thinks, she never needed to meddle after all. Nanami has made it out, long before anyone else ever thought of it.

“So,” Anthy says. “Where will you go now?”

Nanami huffs.

“I don’t know,” she says with a flounce of her skirt as she stands. “But I do know that I’m done. Done playing other people’s games, yours or anyone else’s. The only games I’ll be playing from now on, are my own.”

Anthy can’t help but smile — and she’s almost surprised to find it widening against her lips. She leans forward with her chin on her hands, smiling up at Nanami.

“You’ve changed,” she says.

“I should hope so,” Nanami sniffs. She turns on her heel, to go where, Anthy does not know. Nor is it important, she thinks. Wherever Nanami goes, she is finding her own path. Just as Anthy is.

But Nanami hesitates. For a moment, she only stands there, her back to Anthy. Her hands roll up and uncurl a few times.

“Akio-san is dead,” she says finally, and Anthy feels, for a moment, as though all of the air has rushed out of her chest, stolen away into the aether. “I thought you might like to know.”

And without another word, without waiting for Anthy to respond, she is gone. Disappearing into the crowd of people who now bustle up and down the sidewalks, until she is nothing more than a memory.

But her words are not. Her words remain, lodged in Anthy’s heart, bubbling in her throat.

_ Ah _ , Anthy thinks, as she feels tears begin to roll down her cheeks. _ So that’s how it is. _


	4. The Hole Without Eternity

She remembers Akio in her life before she remembers herself.

“Come here, Anthy,” he had once laughed, clapping his hands encouragingly at her. “Come over here.”

Her legs, small and wobbly, barely enough to hold up her baby body, had strained and struggled to reach his outstretched hands. When she finally tumbles into him, he catches her, and his voice is alight with excitement.

“That’s it! You did it!”

The warmth in his voice is like the sun, and she feels as though she’s climbed a mountain instead of only walking a few steps.

She thinks, perhaps, she remembers parents. Maybe she had them, maybe she didn’t. They’re more...impressions. Memories of concepts rather than people. Perhaps in the end, she and Dios had never truly had parents. Perhaps they had simply arisen out of some need of the world, a world that had decided it wanted a prince, and a prince that had decided it wanted a sister.

There was a time when Dios had made her feel the safest in all the world. When her hand gripped in his was support, rather than possession. She remembers his round, boyish face — the light in his eyes. She remembers how he wiped her tears away every time she cried when he had to go.

“Don’t worry, Anthy,” he’d said. “I’ll be home soon.”

And he always was. He always came home — battered, sometimes. A bruised eye, a slight limp, a split lip. But he always smiled. He always scooped her into his arms and hugged her until she thought her bones might pop.

“Where do you go?” she’d asked once.

“It’s not important,” he’d told her. “You don’t need to worry. I’ll always protect you.”

But she’d learned.

One way or another, she’d learned where he went. And seeing him like that — it hurt. It hurt to see him throw himself against the world, over and over again. Saving every girl, being every girl’s prince.

She grew taller. She grew older. The lengths between his absences grew longer. The battered bruises grew more prominent when he came home. His arms were too weak to hug her properly.

She loved him. He was her brother. The smiling boy she remembers more than the parents she may or may not have had, the one who clapped his hands for her and encouraged her to take her first wobbling steps.

_ “Come here, Anthy,” _ he’d encouraged.

_ “Come here, Anthy,” _ he’d commanded later.

She doesn’t remember when it really happened — when his words had changed from loving to commanding. From sweet honey to sticky trap. All she knows is that he was all she had for so long.

They were only children, then. If parents had existed, it was during that time when they no longer did. His hand held hers so gently, and she followed after the flutter of his cape, giggling when she found him hiding in a bush during a game of hide and seek — he looked so silly, then, all crunched up inside the bush with sticks and leaves in his hair, the thorns catching on his cape when he tried to get out. He’d fallen on his face once, and she’d laughed and laughed so hard that even he’d begun to laugh, mud streaked over his nose. No one else had ever seen him like this. It was their gentle secret — only she got to see him as he was, real and silly and not the glowing princely figure that people loved and even worshiped. They never would have understood him, she thought — never would have understood the soft, grinning boy with mud on his nose and leaves in his hair, the boy who scooped her up in a tight hug, who clapped and praised her for writing her first wobbly letters, who brushed her hair and kissed her bruises when she tripped and fell. 

The Tale of the Rose always told the story that she’d imprisoned him, stolen him away, because she was the only one he couldn’t make a princess. But she  _ had _ been his princess. He’d carried her on her shoulders to reach for apples, and helped her slice them into manageable bites. He’d held her when she cried for one reason or another. He’d hummed lullabies to her to help her fall asleep after a nightmare. When she’d first encouraged a rose to bloom beneath her hands, he’d told her it was beautiful — that she was beautiful.

And she’d hated the world for not seeing him for the reality that only she knew.

So she’d stolen him away from them. She wanted him only for her — his smile only hers, his soft hand in hers only for her, not for those who screamed and begged him to throw himself over and over into places that ripped at his skin and tore at his strength. 

And in the end, what did it do for her?

In the end, he’d decided he hated her.

Which one was really him, she wonders in the depths of her mind? Which one? The smiling Dios who held her hand — was he real, or only a fantasy she’d imagined? The smiling Akio who’d patted her head with one hand, and pinned her to the couch with the other — was he real, or had she imagined him, too? 

And she hates to think which one is real, because in her heart, she knows — she loved them both. She loved Akio as she’d loved Dios. Even though it hurt. Even though his kindnesses had been so few and far between. She’d decided that she had to love him, that if she didn’t, that something would be lost. And somewhere, she still did.

Before she knows it, Anthy bends over her table and cries.

She cries for the brother she loved. For the brother who is now dead.

No. He was already dead, long ago. She knows that, more than anything. He died long, long ago, before she realized it. The man she had thought she would follow to the ends of the earth, who she thought would protect her, had become a living corpse a long time ago. He is not her prince. He never was.

There never was a prince in this world.

And so she cries — not for the brother who is dead. But for the brother she remembers. For the brother who could have been. 

But mostly she cries for herself, for the girl who loved him, and for the girl who lost so much because of him, because of loving him, and because of not loving herself enough. She cries for the girl who left everything of herself behind and tried to fill in the gaps with him, with someone who never loved her the way she needed to be loved, who was long, long dead before she’d even had the chance to mourn.

She should have left a long, long time ago.

The tears still blur her eyes when she stands up, and pushes away from the table. Chuchu scrambles up to her hand and then to her shoulder. He tries to wipe at her tears with a napkin. She smiles, and strokes his head.

Nanami is right.

She has stayed here too long. Lingered for too long. And for a moment, she’d almost looked for a chance to go back.

It seems that perhaps, she hasn’t left it all behind yet. She needs to go even farther. As far as possible. That’s where Utena will be waiting for her. She’s sure of it.

She takes one more moment, standing and lingering, in the shadow of Ohtori, her eyes closed. She lets herself think, for one last moment, of Dios’s smiling face, reaching out his hands for hers.

Then she lets the image disappear from her mind. It won’t be gone forever. She’ll remember him, and mourn him, again.

But for now, she needs to remember herself. 

And so, for herself, she steps away from the table. And she continues walking forward.


	5. Who Leaves, Who Never Stays

Anthy walks. Even though the city seems as endless as before, the heat has broken. There are clouds, now, passing one after the other, breaking the rays of the sun before they can reach her, blocking out the shadows of the people who pass her. 

Sometimes, when she glances at a wall or a storefront beside her, she thinks she might see the silhouettes of the shadow girls, peeking at her from alleys or around corners. But then another cloud passes over the sun, and they’re gone — she’s not sure how much is imagination, how much is dream, and how much is real.

She’s not sure when the rain begins to fall. It comes in shadows, first, just little spots appearing and fading against the concrete. Umbrellas start to bloom among the walkers as they hurry past. Anthy did not bring an umbrella.

When the first drops hit against her hair and begin to roll down her face like the tears she’d just finished crying, she thinks she can keep walking. Then the sheets begin to rain down — the water clings her clothes to her skin, drags her hair down against the nape of her neck, and her bangs into her eyes, and she can hardly see where she’s going. Water fills her shoes, making every step slosh and squish beneath her. There’s water in her  _ bones _ .

Chuchu squeaks in her ear, and she pushes her bangs from her face to glance towards him. He points with his tail — a bus stop. Despite the desire to keep walking, to never stop, this rain is too hard to see in. She can barely tell if she’s walking forward, or if she’s turned around.

She hurries to the bus station, and ducks beneath the the glass roof. The water streams over the side in a rhythmic waterfall as, reluctantly, she sets her suitcase on the bench, and takes a moment to squeeze the water out of her hair. There is nothing to be done for her clothes or shoes, so she wrings out the hem of her dress as best she can, and takes a moment to slip her feet from her shoes to dump the water out in a puddle that streams down the sidewalk.

Then there’s nothing to do but wait.

She stands for a while, staring at the rain as it streams down from the sky. Her feet begin to pang again, and reluctantly, she sits down on the bench beside her suitcase. She stares at the cloudy sky, feels the water still clinging to her skin, and waits. And waits. How long does it take for the rain to pass?

People continue to pass by, umbrella or cases over their heads, as they run through the rain. They make splashes through the puddles, leaving ripples imprinted behind them before the water swallows up their footprints. There are so many of them that Anthy doesn’t hear the slow, careful scrape of shoes picking their way around the puddles, making their way into the bus station, until the girl has ducked beneath the ceiling, and is almost right beside her.

Anthy looks up. Her lips part to realize that it is yet another face she recognizes.

Takatsuki Shiori doesn’t look at her as she lowers her umbrella, shaking it off lightly to the side before closing it and tucking it beneath her hands like a cane against the ground. She tucks a strand of her dark brown hair between one ear, and in the motion, her eyes flicker, and catch on Anthy staring.

She smiles. It’s a nice smile — but it’s only skin deep. The kind of of smile that hides the roil beneath, reserved for strangers for whom you don’t want to guess at who you are yet.

“It’s quite a storm, isn’t it?” she says in a high, girlish voice.

For a moment, Anthy can only stare. She takes in the girl she once watched carefully in her time as a puppetmaster — the exact same girl. Not like Nanami, who had changed — Shiori still wears Ohtori’s uniform. She still wears the same smile. The same eyes. The same stance. Shiori has not changed.

And yet, here she is. Outside of Ohtori. On her own power?

“You’re from Ohtori,” Anthy says, finally.

Shiori’s smile slips. She tilts her head, glancing Anthy up and down. When she smiles again, it’s changed — from the hidden smile for strangers, into a curious, calculating smile. Still hiding behind it, but with more curiosity of what to gain from the interaction.

“I am,” she says. “Have we met?”

Anthy watches her for a moment. Then she looks away, reaching for Chuchu in her lap and stroking his ear.

“No,” she says.

She thinks — hopes — that perhaps that will be it. But Shiori shifts from foot to foot, and Anthy can feel her eyes on her. She wonders if Shiori knows. If she remembers, though they never spoke face to face, or saw each other more than in passing.

Anthy knows Shiori more than Shiori has a right to know her.

Once, she was a part of Anthy and Akio’s world. Her immature soul had drawn attention. But she’d left before Ohtori could truly get her claws into her — that is, until Akio decided on Juri as one of his candidates. That is, until Anthy paid closer attention to Juri for Akio’s sake, and learned of Shiori. Until Anthy found ways of drawing her back into Ohtori, of luring her back into Juri’s life. 

But to Shiori, Anthy should be nothing more than a passing ghost.

And yet, Shiori watches her, with more understanding than Anthy feels she should. Shiori hums, tossing her umbrella over one shoulder, her cute, girlish stance giving way to a more casual slouch.

Anthy cannot hold her question in.

“Have you left the school?” she asks. “Have you graduated?”

Shiori glances at her from the corner of her eye, and Anthy does the same, unwilling to turn her face completely to her. Then Shiori smiles once again. It’s changed again, that smile, but this time, even Anthy isn’t sure what kind of smile to call it.

Shiori taps her umbrella against her shoulder.

“Not yet,” she says. “I could leave any time I wanted to, though.”

In her voice, Anthy can hear it — she knows. Shiori understands the nature of Ohtori, more than she should.

“Then why don’t you?” 

Shiori only continues to smile.

“I won’t leave until I’m done,” she says.

Anthy almost asks. But she doesn’t have to. She knows Shiori — maybe she knows Shiori better than Shiori knows herself. Anthy took it upon herself to dig deep, to tease out the threads that knit the girl together, to make use of the tangles for Akio’s games. Shiori isn’t the type to leave Ohtori. Not the way Nanami did. Not the way Anthy has.

“I’m just taking a break,” Shiori says. “It’s easy to come and go. It always has been. I thought it would be better, to leave and make Juri upset. Then when I came back, I’d see how much she thought about me.”

Anthy doesn’t look at her. Shiori keeps talking, almost as though no one is listening, as though Anthy isn’t there, and she’s simply speaking her thoughts aloud. And perhaps, Anthy isn’t here. Perhaps in the end, for Shiori, no one is here except her.

“I’ll make her wait. It so annoys her. And I’ll come back and get to see that face she always makes. Coming and going is easy. Someday I’ll leave forever.”

She’s still wearing Ohtori’s uniform.

Anthy does not smile. Does not look at her. She feels, suddenly, a pit in her stomach. It’s not sadness, or guilt. Not for Shiori.

No, it’s...

It’s a sadness for herself.  _ Coming and going is easy. Leaving forever is for later. _ Had she thought the same, once? That she could put the game aside any time she truly wanted? Perhaps she had. She had thought for a moment during this journey that she could go back for just a moment. But she knows that this isn’t possible.

If you let yourself go back even once, the second time leaving is even harder.

The rain continues to pound against the roof, but Shiori falls silent. A bus pulls up to the curb, lights glowing in the cloudy dark. Shiori doesn’t move towards it right away. Anthy doesn’t stand.

She flinches when Shiori pops in front of her, with a strange, knowing smile. For a moment, Anthy is afraid. How much does Shiori actually know or understand? Could Anthy have underestimated her? Underestimated everyone?

But Shiori only smiles, and tucks the umbrella against Anthy’s hand.

“Keep it,” she says, bouncing back. “I won’t need it where I’m going.”

She smiles again, turns, and heads for the bus. Anthy watches her, only lightly holding the umbrella, and watches her disappear inside. Watches the bus pull away, and disappear into the rain.

She stares at the place where Shiori once was. The girl who built her life around Juri, and believed it was to spite her — instead recognizing of the truth of who she was  _ actually  _ hurting. Anthy considers the umbrella.

And she thinks, for a moment, that she and Shiori might not have been so different after all.

She stands up, and leaves the umbrella leaned against the bench. As she steps out of the bus station, the rain begins to thin. The clouds break, and the sun peeps out once again.

Perhaps Shiori will understand and find a way to leave one day. Perhaps she won’t. But Anthy has no time to think of her. It’s time to leave Ohtori’s city, and its people, behind.

The sun breaks over her, drying her hair, and she raises one hand over her eyes to shade them. As she squints, she finds that the world outside the bus station has changed. The city sidewalk has dried away along with the puddles, and the buildings have faded like a mirage. Instead, she looks out at a long, winding dirt path, leading up rolling hills of rippling green grass and bobbing flowers. The air tastes clear and sweet, and the breeze makes her hair ripple against her shoulders. Chuchu squeaks, his tail curling up.

Anthy takes a step onto the path. Before she can stop herself, she hesitates.

She looks over her shoulder.

She can still see the city. It glitters against the horizon, glowing like a castle in the sky. But almost in the same way that it had once seemed endless, it seems endlessly far away. Ohtori is far away with it.

But there is nothing for her to look back to. She closes her eyes, and faces forward once again. Her suitcase in her hand, she begins walking once more.


	6. Tracing Another Path

The world is wider than she remembers it being. Anthy raises a hand to her eyes, shielding them against the sun to look down from the hill she’s just crested. The fields pour on forever and ever, it seems, as long and endless as the city once had been. But there’s nothing to do but keep following the path she’s on. There are no others that she can see.

She stops herself, then, letting her hand sag. No other paths but the one before her? The thought makes her skin crawl with the familiarity of such a thought. She looks again, squinting through the sun, across the wide open meadows with their beautiful bobbing blossoms. 

No other paths reveal themselves to her, though. The only one is the one that lays before her. That...upsets her, she realizes. It’s as though she has no choice.

She starts walking down the hill, anyway, following the packed dirt path, searching the horizon for another. A walk is an easy time for a mind to wander, even though she tries to keep her mind on the search for other paths, other choices. And wander her mind does.

_ “A duel?” _

_ Anthy glances up at him, drawing her jacket around her bare shoulders. He pushes his arms back into his own shirt, his back to her as he begins to fasten each button one a time. _

_ “Yes. A duel.” _

_ She watches him, stares at his neck with a feeling akin to dissociation, while she watches him tighten the tie around his collar once again. Not once does he turn around to look at her. _

_ “You are the Rose Bride. We’ll have you be the prize. They’ll duel over you — over the chance for you to lead them into eternity. Into....a castle. We’ll make a beautiful illusion for them to strive for.” _

_ He snaps his fingers once, clearly growing excited. Anthy feels nothing. She stands up, walks across the floor to find where her socks went. She methodically pulls one on after the other, even though she’s wearing nothing else. _

_ “I don’t know why I never thought of it before. A duel is the perfect way for a prince to forge a true sword, a sword that can break the seal.” _

_ She tugs her skirt back on, fastening the clip. He keeps talking. She barely listens. He’ll tell her what’s important for her to know later. At least he finally has a new idea ever since the scientific route didn’t work. When he doesn’t have an idea, a scheme, he’s unbearable. He mopes. And he is terribly handsy when he mopes. _

_ One way or another. He’ll tell her where to go. What to do. And she’ll do it. Oh, she will. After all, it will make him happy. It will make him...make him the person she remembers again. _

_ Her thoughts feel very far away from her right now. She buttons up her shirt, one a time. It only occurs to her when she’s finished that she’s forgotten to put her bra back on. _

_ That’s all right. She’ll take the path he tells her. If it’s to be a dueling game, then...that is the path she’ll follow. _

Anthy stops dead in the path, closing her eyes. Too far. Her mind has wandered too far. She needs to reign it back in. 

Her mouth is dry, and her hands shake. Chuchu scrambles down her arm, sitting on her suitcase with his tail looped through the handles so he can pat her hand.

She’s crying again, she realizes. She’s been doing so much of that, lately. It’s almost as though once she let herself, she can now never stop. 

She starts walking to shake the thoughts off, hoping the strain of her legs and feet will make her forget. The memories follow, tighter, now, closer on her heels. The letters he typed up on his machine, while she waited in front of his desk. The bright-eyed young students who followed the instructions and found the dueling field, and her waiting for them. The students whom she and Akio had picked, special, had teased out from the crowd because they might have merit, because they were easy to goad, because they were easy to understand and use.

Anthy starts to run, her breath tight in her throat and crushing at her lungs. Her suitcase flaps against her legs.

How many times did they try the dueling game? Twice? Ten times? Only once? She can’t remember. Her mind is a thick, gloppy stew, sloshing around in her head, and she can’t think, she can’t breathe, all of a sudden all she can remember is  _ him _ —

But not the him she mourns, not the one she wished for, not even the hollow shell she pretended she still loved — the one standing over her, grabbing her by the wrists and slamming her into whatever was nearest, the one who never asked, the one that made her  _ afraid _ even at the time she didn’t want to acknowledge that she was. The one who laid down the path before her and built the gates on either side, the one who told her  _ this is where you go _ , and did not ask for input, who didn’t listen, who barely even looked at her, the one who made her — 

She screams before she realizes it. Her ankle catches and twists. She goes down onto the path, face into the dirt, and she trembles and cries. Oh, god, but it’s so close, now, that feeling of  _ fear _ . She had been...she had been afraid of him. She’d made herself forget how afraid she was of him.

Oh, god, it’s only now catching up to her, and crushing down on her all at once. 

She can’t get up. She can’t get back up. Oh god. She’s never going to get back up again. She’ll be trapped, trapped on this awful road forever and ever and ever, with no means of escaping it, no means of ever truly leaving behind the fear she thought she’d pushed so deep down — 

Chuchu nuzzles against her face, chirping worriedly. She opens her eyes.

She still lays on the dirt path. A breeze still wafts through grasses, rippling before her eyes. But the sky is dim, now. She twitches her fingers. She curls them into the dirt, digging into it to feel something — anything. Chuchu nuzzles against her again, and she remembers, slowly, how to breathe.

When she rises back to her knees, her dress dusty with dirt, she finds that the sun is setting. Glorious pinks, purples, yellows paint the sky in a gradient, from the purest yellow, to the deepest blue. Stars glitter in the sky, and once again, her heart squeezes. She thinks of him again when she looks at the stars.

But these stars are far away, and real. Not the painted shadows on the ceiling who watched unfeeling every night. And for now, she finds, as she puts her head to her chest, feeling her heart slowing, the fear has faded. Not gone. It will be back, she thinks. It will never be far away — not right away.

But she is strong enough to stand once again.

She forces herself to her aching feet. Chuchu leaps onto her suitcase, and clambers to her shoulder once again, curling his tail around her ear. She takes another step forward.

Then she hesitates. She stares at the single path that stretches before her. The shadow girls advised her to go forward. But which way is forward?

Her eyes wander to the grasses. As the sun sets, melting below the horizon, she watches as a thin haze of mist begins to rise up from the grass. It will be dark, and foggy soon. She’ll be turned around.

She takes a step off of the path, anyway. Just one. And then another. The grasses brush against her legs as she walks deeper into the meadow, away from the path. There was only one path to be seen.

But she’s learned, hasn’t she?

Not every path is visible.


	7. The Boy In the Mist

Anthy has no idea if she’s going forward, or backwards. She decides, for once, to trust in her own feet. Her heart feels as though she is moving forward — she decides to take a chance, and believe in it.

The fog curls around her feet, leaving behind thin strips of condensation that cling to her skin. It’s not wet enough to make her dress heavy with the damp, but enough to make the air feel like a living thing, like cloth from ghosts who brush past her. The grass is thick with dew, and her shoes are quickly soaked. 

The night goes on, and still, she walks, parting the fog before her in dark, smoky swirls. It’s very like a dream, she thinks. Not at all unlike the haze she once lived in within her own mind, inside the shell of the dreamlike egg she’d once resided in. The familiarity makes her shudder. She walks a little faster. Perhaps, this time, she can outrun the memories. If she finds herself forced to stop again, by fear, by uncertainty, by memory — will she start again, this time? 

The possibility of stopping, and never being able to move on again, is enough to make her feet move a little faster.

The mist curls tighter, closer. The air is thick, and hard to breathe.

_ Don’t think about what’s behind you. _

She sucks down air but it’s like drinking soup.

_ Don’t think. Don’t remember. _

The mantra isn’t helping. She can feel the tug of those terrible memories, the ones that laid her low before she left the path — even though she’s forged her own path, it isn’t enough to avoid them, to escape the memories. Will they follow her always? Will she never be able to forget?

Her lungs are full of fog, and it’s hazing over her mind, now, filling up her entire body until she feels as though she’s nothing more than air. She nearly trips over a sprig of grass, but manages to right herself. She cannot fall. If she falls, she’ll be trapped again. If she falls a third time, she’s not sure she’ll get up. How many times can she fall before she gives up?

She can’t even see the stars for the fog. It’s as though she’s floating in nothing. If not for the ground beneath her feet, she would think she had drifted away from the earth. She tries to inhale. She can’t breathe.

It seems as though she might melt directly into the air, might simply fade into nothing more than a breath, forgotten and lost in the middle of the night. Except it’s then she sees the light.

She hesitates, but only a breath, only a hitch in her step, and continues to walk, afraid that stopping even to squint will stop her from starting. The light glows faintly, almost swallowed up by the mist, but unmistakable. It flickers, a small orange light, like...a candle, she realizes.

A second light becomes visible. Then a third. She presses on, squinting through the fog.

She finally, finally lets herself stop when she pushes through the mist, and as though chased away by the candelabra that dangles from his fingers, the mist hangs behind her, leaving the two of them alone in a patch of clear grass, surrounded by walls of mist.

Her lips part, and a curious squeezing tightens in her chest.

It’s another face she knows.

He stands still, staring at nothing, his head tilted back towards the stars, though he doesn’t seem to see them. His short pink hair falls back from his face, shoulders slumped. The lit candles in the candelabra flicker as the golden rod hangs limp from his fingers. The mist has been so thick that if he dropped it, the candles would likely go out the minute they hit the ground rather than catching fire.

That curious squeeze comes again, to see him like this. Standing still, staring aimlessly. Like a ghost...like a shell. 

Is this where he has been all this time, since he was forced out from Ohtori, made into nothing more than the echo of a memory?

Her lips part, and the name slips from her without asking.

“Mikage?” she whispers, her voice sounding so loud against the endless silence. “Souji Mikage?”

He does not respond. It’s as though he doesn’t hear her. As though, somehow, they aren’t even in the same world. She tries again.

“Professor Nemuro?”

That gets the barest reaction. He flickers his gaze as though hearing the distant buzzing of a fly. His feet shift, somewhat unstable, like he might fall over with the slightest breeze. He frowns, face tensing only very slightly, as though it takes incredible effort for him to make even the slightest motion.

His body shudders, then, and he turns slowly, squinting through the dark. His eyes swing to Anthy’s. He squints narrower, brow crinkling with confusion. His mouth moves once, twice, without sound. He swallows, and tries again.

“M...Mamiya?” he croaks.

Anthy finally recognizes what the feeling of squeezing in her chest is. It’s regret.

The memories are thick, but faint, like the swirling morass of the mist that encloses the two of the them together. The first time she met Mikage, it was before he thought of himself as such. He responded only to Nemuro — until slowly, his mind had drifted from him, until the poison she’d worked into his memories had begun to break him apart, and he’d forgotten even his own true name.

He’d smiled so purely at her, though, to see her. He’d embraced her. Called her Mamiya, and whispered words of sweet relief to see that he had not perished in the flames.

It had felt so very, very strange, to be met with such warmth and kindness, even for a moment. Even if it wasn’t really for her.

Lying had become so second nature to her, that it had startled her how dusty the lies tasted on her tongue when she spoke them to him. He was only a broken boy, who thought himself a man. Just like all the others had been, the others whom she’d had no troubles lying to.

Why had it seemed so different to lie to him?

She softens her eyes, and her voice, and shakes her head.

“No,” she whispers. “I’m not Mamiya.”

He stares at her, as though trying to read her face. His lips parted. He mouths the name again —  _ Mamiya _ — and for a moment, seems as though he’s about to reach a shaking hand to her face. But he lets it drop. His eyes unfocus, slide off of her. He shakes his head slowly.

“I...I don’t remember,” he mumbles. “I don’t remember.”

His voice cracks, and Anthy can’t understand why she feels as though her heart does, too.

He lingers for a moment longer. Then, as though she’s no longer there, he turns, and begins to walk away into the mist. The bubble of mist moves with him, the wall overcoming her as he leaves. She waits, and watches, while the flicker of his candles finally disappear into the thick, misty night.

It takes her a long moment to realize that there is a tear running down her cheek, and it’s not just the damp touch of the mist. She raises a finger to her cheek, wipes at the tear with surprise and stares at it on her finger.

For him? Does she cry for him?

Why...why does it hurt so much?

She’s afraid of the memories. She’s so, so afraid. But she saw the look of broken spirit in his eyes, when he had murmured  _ I don’t remember _ . His memories...had been precious to him. And they were gone.

Would she be better off, not having memories? If she forgot everything, right now, would it hurt her to lose them all? Would she, too, be an aimless ghost, lost in the night forever like him? Or would it be sweet relief, to not feel those memories dragging at her heels, dogging her every step? What memories does she have that she wants to — 

She stops her thoughts in her tracks. At once, she understands, then. She understands, why she regrets Mikage. Why lying to him had felt painful.

And why forgetting would be a curse.

More tears flood to her eyes, but she blinks them away. 

For the first time, since the moment she used it to draw herself over the threshold, she remembers why she’s come so far. She remembers where she’s going.

_ Utena _ .

Her face fills Anthy’s mind’s eye like the sun cresting over the horizon. Her smile. The annoyed noise she made when someone upset her. The ferocity in her eyes. The lost look when she looked down at the ring on her finger. The soft feeling of her hand in hers. The way her hair crested over her shoulders, fell against the dark of her uniform.

She’d once embraced Anthy, too. She hadn’t seen Anthy for who she was — neither had Mikage.

And yet...despite that...the affection had been real. Even if it hadn’t been for her, for the real her, for the her that Utena could never have realized was beneath the surface, it had been real. And it had felt like home.

She looks at her fingertips, and for a moment, she feels the burn against her skin, the echo of the friction of Utena’s fingers, where she’d tried so hard to hang on as Anthy had slipped away. The moment when Utena had seen, had known, everything, had seen every part of her — and still tried to reach for her. 

Had still loved her.

Her eyes fill with tears, and she closes them, curling her hand together. Eyes still closed, she turns away from Mikage. She walks again.

This time, the memories don’t hurt. This time, they fill her, and they guide her on.

She walks.

Utena is waiting for her.


	8. Where Memories Grow Like Roses

“Himemiya. Himemiya! Hey, Himemiya! Where are you?”

The voice echoes down hallways she’s never walked before, and yet, she’s there. She feels an unfamiliar fabric against her skin, as she runs through door after door. The voice grows farther away. Or perhaps it grows closer. Is she running away from it, or towards it?

She’s not sure.

“Himemiya? Are you awake?”

Her eye crack open. In the dark, the stars and moon catch against the glitter of Utena’s eyes, making the sky blue irises look as deep and dark as distant galaxies. Her hand slides out from under her covers, lying against the connecting part of their beds. Anthy reaches back, slides her hand into Utena’s.

“What’s wrong?” she whispers.

Utena looks uncharacteristically troubled. Her brows furrow, she bites at the edge of her lip. Her hand squeezes Anthy’s.

“Did I wake you?” she asks.

“No,” Anthy lies.

Utena gnaws on her bottom lip. She tightens her other hand into her covers, turning to lay on her side so it’s easier to hold on to Anthy.

“I feel like I might have had a bad dream,” she says.

“You might have?”

“Mm. I...it’s disappearing, now.”

She licks her lips, and Anthy feels a curious sensation, a tingling, running down her arm from where she grips Utena’s hand. Her eyes catch on the way Utena’s hair slides across her shoulder, part of it falling forwards to lay against the front of her neck.

“And?” Anthy prompts, when Utena doesn’t speak.

“I...I don’t know,” Utena says, biting harder on her lip. “I just...I woke up, and I was...afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

Utena’s eyes briefly slide away from her, gaze flicking up to the starry window behind her. Anthy can nearly see every bit of every constellation just from looking into her eyes.

“Afraid that if I turned over, you...you wouldn’t be there.”

Anthy’s heart tightens. She thinks, about how she’d only just nodded off before Utena spoke. How only moments before that, she’d only just been getting back into bed. She’d only just left  _ him _ . If Utena had woken up a few moments earlier, if she’d turned over and looked, reached for Anthy only a few minutes sooner — her dream might have been true.

“I’m here now,” is what she says.

Utena’s smile, groggy and distant with sleep and nerves, is so open and vulnerable. Not a single bit of her is hidden away. It’s as though Anthy can see the whole of her soul — not because there’s little there, but because Utena isn’t, and has never, tried to hide any of herself. Everything that is  _ Utena _ simply spills out of her all at once all the time, even the parts of her she doesn’t know are within her.

Somehow, it hurts to look at. But Anthy can’t look away, either.

“I know,” Utena says, squeezing her hand. “And I’m...glad.”

There’s so much sincerity in Utena’s voice that it actually stings. Anthy sucks in a breath, wondering if Utena can sense it. If she notices.

Anthy swallows through a tight, dry throat.

“Utena,” she whispers.

“What is it?”

Anthy could tell her. She could tell her everything. What the Rose Bride is. What Akio plans for Utena. What Anthy and Akio have been...

She could release it all from where it festers in her chest, and tell her  _ everything _ .

For a moment, the words stick like molasses in her throat. She tries, just once, to push them out. Utena’s eyes glitter with starlight. Anthy closes her mouth — what if, if she lets it out, Utena’s eyes will cloud with confusion? Or worse?

With anger?

What if her hand drops out of Anthy’s?

Why does the possibility frighten her so?

“Nothing,” she says. “Never mind.”

Utena is already half asleep again, and she hardly seems to hear Anthy’s answer.

Anthy runs through door after door after door, down darkened hallway after darkened hallway, and she has no idea where she is. Her very skin feels foreign and unfamiliar to her, as though she is wearing someone else’s.

And still, someone is calling for her.

“Himemiya — Himemiya, wait! Himemiya, please, wait! I’m — wait!  _ Wait! _ ”

Anthy’s eyes crack open, and her lips crack with dryness. She can’t remember the last time she had a drink of water. How long has she been walking, anyway? And when did she fall asleep?

Chuchu pokes at her lips. When she opens her eyes, he squeaks, and pushes a leaf with the barest few drops of water cupped inside it at her with his tail. She sucks the droplets down automatically, squinting at the light.

The sun has risen. Her back aches, and she sits up from the tree she’d leaned against. Her entire back side aches with twists and knobbly imprints from the roots and bark. Her hair feels tangled. She combs through it with on hand, absently.

She is still in the field, and there is no mist, no fog, no darkened hallways and doors like the ones that litter her mind. No path. Knees cracking, she steps carefully to her feet while Chuchu hops back to her shoulder. She reaches down for her suitcase, hefting it up against her hands. It feels heavy once again — but so heavy, this time, that it is almost difficult to carry. She takes care not to drop it as she steps over a copse of grass.

The echoes of her dreams tug at her, and she does not fight them. She only walks, carefully, slowly, and without rushing, towards the rising sun, while a cool breeze tickles at her face and dries away the condensation of the morning.

How far away is Anthy now? How much farther will she walk before she finds Utena? Is Utena truly close, or was it only a dream?

What will she do if this journey never ends?

As the thought strikes her, shakes her to her bones, she feels her foot crunch against something. Something not grass. Something that smells like...roses.

She lifts her foot, and looks beneath it. Beneath the toe of her shoe is a small pile of forgotten petals. She crouches to take one, raising it to her nose. It’s a rose. A  _ white _ rose. 

Anthy shoots straight up, eyes scanning the horizon. This field is full of flowers, but none of them are roses. Much less white ones. Chuchu squeaks. She follows the point of his tail, squinting and taking another step forward. Another scattering of discarded white rose petals, hidden among the grass. They trail off, almost invisible in places. Anthy’s heart quickens.

She walks as quickly as she can find them, the petals that make a breadcrumb trail through the grasses. It can’t be coincidence, can it? Utena must have been here. She’s somewhere up ahead, Anthy is sure of it!!

Chuchu shrieks in her ear just in time for her to look up, just in time for her to see the glass wall before she smacks into it. She stops, staring — she can see her own face reflected faintly in the glass, her lips parting with shock. She looks...tired, she decides. But she also looks, perhaps, a little stronger.

Anthy touches the glass, frowning. Where did it come from? Her fingers trail along it until she finds a pole attached to it. She comes around the side, and finds herself looking at...at a bus stop. She looks back and forth. The bus stop sits right in the middle of the field, with no road connecting it. Nothing to show that it’s real, save for its solidity beneath her fingers, and the blue sign with the bus symbol painted on it that sits silently beside it. What is it doing out here? Where did it come from? Do buses actually arrive out here, in the middle of nothing?

Chuchu squeaks once more, and she once more follows where he points. He scrambles from her shoulder, hops to the ground, and runs up onto the bench. He makes a circle with his tail while he points at what’s been left on the seat.

Anthy approaches, and picks up the full white rose carefully in one hand. As she cups it against her fingers and brings it to her nose, she closes her eyes to inhale the scent. When she opens her eyes and lets her hand back down from her face, the rose is gone. In its place is a small slip of paper. A bus ticket.

She hears the soft gush of steam escaping a vehicle as it comes to a stop and settles. She turns.

Behind her, a silent as a ghost, a bus sits just outside the station. The driver’s face is in shadow, and does not look at her. She squints. For a moment, the driver looked very like one of the shadow girls she’d met before. But she can’t quite place them as such. The doors roll open. She looks down at the ticket.

_ Asakusa _ , it reads.

She’s never been to such a place. But...perhaps...

She reaches one hand down to the bench for Chuchu to scramble back up. Then she takes up her suitcase again, and climbs onto the empty bus. The driver says nothing, does not look at her. She slips her ticket into the box beside them, and the doors close behind her.

The bus rumbles beneath her feet, and she walks to the middle, sliding into one of the seats. She stares out into the field as the bus begins to rattle away from the stop. It turns in towards the sun, and then, for a moment, it becomes too bright to look out the window. So Anthy turns her eyes away instead, sighs, and closes her eyes.


	9. The Ties That Bind Us

It hasn’t been long since Anthy has been in a city, and yet it feels like ages. She steps from the bus, and immediately must step off to the side, pressing against the station lest she be bustled away by hundreds of people who run up and down the sidewalks. The sky shines clear overhead, and a girl dressed like a frog strikes a pose on a giant television screen affixed to a tall building. Anthy watches her a moment, if only to look away from the hustle and bustle of the city and regain her bearings. She inhales air that smells of exhaust rather than flowers, but it is air nonetheless.

She turns from the bus station, searching for some other clue. Another rose, perhaps. But it seems that fortunate clues only happen once. 

Chuchu pokes her in the cheek, and she turns towards him, hoping that perhaps he’s spotted another clue. He only gives her a big-eyed stare and pats his tiny stomach before it lets out a growl much too large for such a tiny creature. Anthy can’t help but smile.

“All right,” she says, scratching his head. “We’ll find something to eat.”

The rest in the bus had done her much more good than her rest against a tree. She feels fresh and light again, though her feet are beginning to develop some painful calluses. She takes her time, no clues to encourage her rush, as she walks down the sidewalk, avoiding running into anyone, avoiding attention.

This city is old, she realizes, as she walks past yet another old, traditional-style storefront. On every corner there is a statue of some kind — short and squat stone carvings of kappa. Tall and brightly painted frog-like creatures that might be supposed to be kappa. This part of the city is more modern, with cars trundling down the road and electric streetlamps, but there are older echoes tucked between them, and when she peeks down some roads leading away, she can see slanted rooftops and paper lanterns, like a city pulled from another time.

Chuchu squeaks, and leaps from Anthy’s shoulder. He scrambles away between legs, and Anthy almost freezes. Where is he going? Why is he leaving? She snaps out of it, and begins to carefully make her way around the streams of people up and down the sidewalk after him. He’s so small she’s afraid for a moment that she might lose him.

But she doesn’t, picking her way to him, and finds him hunched over a plate on the ground. It’s...it’s got pancakes on it. Anthy blinks as she considers it. What are they doing here? Why are they set out like this, as though they were just about to be eaten before they were left here, right in the middle of the sidewalk?

Chuchu tears off a piece and stuffs it into his cheeks, and then another to put in the other cheek. She sighs, and shakes her head with a faint smile. He’s always thinking with his stomach.

“Chuchu, you don’t know where that’s been,” she scolds.

He turns to look at her with his unblinking eyes and stuffed cheeks. Then he turns back to the pancakes, tugging at it to try and pull off another bite. Anthy sighs. Her own stomach aches a bit, but she’s not even sure where to begin looking for something to eat. She doesn’t even have money with her.

Her attention returns to Chuchu when he lets out a little shriek. A very large rat, messy and matted with some bright orange string tangled around it, tugs on the end of the pancakes, while Chuchu tugs on the other, the pair of them playing tug of war with it.

“Chuchu, you can share,” Anthy starts to say. She starts to bend down, hoping to at least help the rat get whatever’s tangled around it off.

The rat lets go suddenly, and Chuchu tumbles back comically. It hisses and leaps over the pancakes at Chuchu, landing on him with a thwump. Chuchu shrieks and wriggles helplessly, but the rat is too busy sitting on top of him while it turns around to nibble at the pancakes to be bothered. Anthy tries not to laugh — Chuchu is in distress after all.

“Could you please get off of my friend?” she asks, crouching down and reaching towards the rat.

The rat turns to look at her and hisses, nipping at her fingers. Not the nicest of rats, then. Anthy will need a different approach. She considers for a moment how to deal with the rat sitting on a now crying Chuchu. Perhaps she can move the pancakes, and the rat will follow after it...

Before she can put such a plan in motion, a second movement catches her attention. Something huge and orange streaks past her. Chuchu shrieks as yet another large, fuzzy creature flops on top of him, and the rat shrieks as the huge orange tabby cat tries to nip at it, and for a moment, all three of them are entirely impossible to separate visually as they tumble about in a furious mess.

“That is  _ enough _ ,” Anthy says sharply.

The animals all freeze as one. The cat has the rat in its mouth, and the rat has Chuchu in its mouth. The orange string has come off onto Chuchu’s head instead. 

“Please put down what you have,” Anthy says firmly.

The animals hesitate for a moment. Then, reluctantly, the rat opens its mouth, and Chuchu drops face first onto the sidewalk. More reluctantly, the cat drops the rat, and the moment its little feet hit the ground, it bolts for the pancakes, grabs the whole stack in its mouth, and disappears down a grate with it. The cat’s tail swishes back and forth, eyes staring after the rat. It looks up at Anthy reproachfully.

“I know you wanted to eat it,” Anthy says, resting her hands on her knees. “But you might have hurt my friend.”

She scoops up a battered, still crying Chuchu into her hands, stroking back his ears and dusting the dirt from his face. She tugs the orange string from where it’s gotten caught on his ear. She frowns, then, because its not just a string after all. It’s some sort of woven bracelet, made of thin orange and red threads braided together. A black and white bead that looks like a soccer ball has been threaded into the middle of it. Despite having been on a rat, it’s remarkably clean, as though it’s brand new from the box. She turns it over in her fingers — it’s soft. And it feels...there’s a tingle to it. As though the echo of something is left within it.

“Ah! Nyantaro!”

The cat looks up, ears flicking forward, and the voice is so clear and close that Anthy looks up, too.

The young man jogs over to the cat. He’s young, younger than Anthy, at least, though that isn’t hard. He’s older than the age she presents as, perhaps nearly eighteen, with a lean face and broad shoulders. But there’s a light in his eyes and in the mess of his dark brown hair, in his tie that hangs undone around his shoulders, that belies a younger, more cheerful spirit than his age might imply.

“I haven’t seen you around in ages!” he says, his voice alight with excitement. “Where have you been?”

The cat purrs when he ruffles its ears, mashing its head into his hand. The boy pets the cat for a moment, before finally blinking and glancing up at Anthy. Anthy looks back at him.

He smiles, but she doesn’t smile back. A nervousness seizes her chest. He is the first stranger to truly notice her, and it...it makes her feel queasy. She doesn’t want to be looked at. She doesn’t want to meet anyone.

“I hope he wasn’t bothering you,” the boy says. He stands up, scooping the cat into his arms. It sort of melts in the way that cats do, hanging limply.

“Oh,” Anthy says, as her mind chugs back to life and she remembers how to act as though she isn’t nervous. “No. He didn’t.”

The cat stares at her, tail flapping softly against the boy’s arms. It looks completely at peace there, unbothered.

“Kazukiii, you left me behind!”

A second boy pops out of a copse of people trying to walk the other direction. He has to fix his glasses, made crooked by bumping into others, and pushes his light orange-brown bangs from his eyes. He jogs over to the boy with the cat, huffing and puffing dramatically.

“You have to keep up,” the boy, Kazuki, laughs. “How are you going to send me a good pass if you can’t keep up with me?”

“Oh, shut up,” the boy says.

His eyes look up at Anthy, then, and he straightens, glancing with confusion between her and Kazuki.

“Uh,” he says. “Do you guys know each other?”

“No,” Anthy says, as Kazuki says “oh, no! She was just with Nyantaro.”

“Nyantaro??”

The glasses boy whips around, finally noticing the cat in Kazuki’s arms. His whole face lights up.

“Where have you  _ been _ ?” he cries, ruffing the cat’s ears. The cat purrs contentedly, clearly pleased with being the center of attention. “Did you find him, ma’am? We haven’t seen him in a while.”

“Oh, no,” Anthy says, shifting back awkwardly. “I only...well, I’m afraid he got a little mixed up with my friend.”

She strokes Chuchu’s head, and he makes a tiny, sad  _ chu _ sound. Both boys look down at Chuchu. Kazuki beams at him, while the glasses boy frowns and tilts his head, confused.

“Nyantaro, did you get into trouble?” Kazuki says, shaking the cat very slightly. Nyantaro only purrs. 

Anthy can’t help but smile a little at the cat’s obvious contentment. He clearly knows and likes these boys. Anthy shifts Chuchu into one hand, separating him from the orange bracelet still hanging from her fingers. When her hands move, the glasses boy’s eyes follow them automatically. Then his eyes widen.

“Ahh!” he cries, making her jump a little as he points at it. “Where did you get that??”

Anthy looks down at it, at the same time Kazuki does. Kazuki’s eyes widen, too, and his mouth drops open.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “It is yours? Chuchu found it on the ground.”

She holds it out towards the boys, but both of them only stare at it. The glasses boy gnaws on his lip, staring at it as though it might divine its secrets to him. Kazuki beams, then.

“This really must be a fated meeting of some kind,” he says. “That’s a  miçanga , isn’t it?”

“A  miçanga ?” 

Anthy looks at it again. It just looks like a bracelet with a soccer ball bead strung onto it. She can’t even begin to imagine what it might mean to these boys, or why they might be made so surprised by it. 

Chuchu, on the other hand, still looks very upset about the loss of the pancakes.

“Is your friend all right?” Kazuki asks, looking at Chuchu.

He actually sounds legitimately concerned. Anthy smiles a little.

“He’s only hungry,” she says, stroking his head. “He lost his pancakes in the scuffle.”

Chuchu sniffles, his tiny tummy grumbling. Anthy smiles, and then her cheeks warm when her own stomach rumbles.

“Oh, that’s no good!” Kazuki says. “Hey, actually, speaking of pancakes, there’s a place that sells them really close — maybe I can buy you some to make up for his.”

“Oh, no, no, please don’t trouble yourself,” Anthy starts.

“No, really!! You sort of helped us find Nyantaro, and you have a  miçanga, and we met on a special day, too — it’s definitely got to mean something!”

The glasses boy doesn’t look nearly as convinced. He starts to open his mouth — but then Kazuki smiles at him, turning to face him.

“Come on, Enta! Let’s all stop for some pancakes!”

Anthy has been around enough, and has known enough, to recognize the way Enta’s face immediately slackens and goes red when Kazuki smiles at him. Her lips part slightly. Ah, she realizes, when Enta fumbles over his words. He’s in love with Kazuki.

“I — uh — I guess! But we don’t have a lot of time, so we should get it to go!”

“Is that okay with you?” Kazuki asks, swinging around with the cat still in his arms, beaming.

Anthy glances down at Chuchu. Chuchu looks hopefully back up at her.  _ Always thinking with your stomach _ , she sighs, shaking her head. But she smiles. Perhaps, Kazuki is right. Perhaps this strange meeting does mean something.

“I suppose if you’re offering, then Chuchu would appreciate it,” Anthy says. “And I would, as well.”

“Great!! I’m Yasaka Kazuki, and this is Jinai Enta!”

“Himemiya Anthy.”

Kazuki lets Nyantaro down from his arms, and the cat actually accompanies them, tail swishing back and forth primly as he walks alongside them. Kazuki leads the way. Normally, Anthy is content to let the conversation flow without here, but when Chuchu scrambles onto her shoulder, leaving the  miçanga as the only thing in her hand, she can’t help but feel curious.

“So, what exactly is this?” she asks, holding it out towards them as they walk.

“It’s a miçanga,” says Enta. “They’re anklets, you wear them like this.”

He hops awkwardly on one foot in order to point at his ankle, his pant leg riding up a little. He’s wearing something very like the one that Anthy is holding, though his is yellow. Kazuki turns to walk backwards so that he can point at the one that he’s also wearing, which is red.

“That one looks a lot like one I lost a while ago,” Enta says, frowning at the one that Anthy holds. 

“The miçanga is a symbol of our connection,” Kazuki explains, still walking backwards. “It was really important to us and a friend of ours once.”

His eyes get a little far away when he says that, making Anthy curious in spite of herself. She feels as though she recognizes that look — like it’s perhaps the same one that crosses her face when she thinks of Utena.

“Is that friend someone who is still near?” she asks.

Kazuki and Enta both get a little far away then. For a moment, neither answer. Then Kazuki smiles.

“As long as we have our connection, he’s always nearby,” he says.

Anthy’s hands tighten around the miçanga, and she feels a strange pang in her chest. The pancake shop appears ahead of them, and before anyone can say anything else, Kazuki turns and bolts towards it. Anthy and Enta both hesitate. Anthy glances at him. Enta only sighs. But he smiles, softly, and puts his hand behind his head.

“He’s really nervous today, actually,” he says. “So don’t take it personally if he’s a little jumpy.”

“Oh,” Anthy says. “I hadn’t noticed.”

_ He’d said today was a special day, _ she thinks, as she follows Enta into the pancake shop.  _ I wonder why _ .

“So, what brings you to Asakusa?” Kazuki asks, when the three of them are waiting for their pancake orders.

Anthy looks up from the miçanga — she’d been rolling it between her fingers, trying to decide how, exactly, it made her feel. Then she hesitated a moment longer, wondering what she could say. How she could say it. If there was a way to explain, or if there was a need.

“The truth is,” she says, “I’m looking for a friend of mine.”

“What happened to them?” asks Enta.

Anthy looks down at the miçanga.

“I’m not sure,” she says. “But I know she’s out there. So I’m going to meet her.”

When she looks up again, Kazuki is beaming once more. He reaches for her hands, and cups them between his. Normally, she’d flinch from a touch like this. But there’s something very gently about the way that Kazuki does it, something that feels all right. He squeezes lightly, and smiles.

“I know you’re going to meet her again,” he says. 

He says it with such  _ conviction _ that it almost takes Anthy’s breath away. 

She realizes, then, why Kazuki’s smile and his hands don’t frighten her. His eyes light up the same way Utena’s do — with an unbridled, unmarred hope. It’s...blinding. And yet, somehow, it’s comforting. She smiles.

“Thank you.”

She twists her hand to briefly hold against his, before she lets go.

“I’m sure that you’ll meet your friend again, too.”

Kazuki looks like he wants to say something else, but a soft ring from the counter lets them know their order is ready. Enta looks at his watch, and his eyes widen.

“Hey, Kazuki,” he says. “If we want to stake out that next bus, we’ve gotta go.”

“What? Already?”

Kazuki snaps his eyes up to the clock on the wall. His own eyes widen. He turns to Anthy with an apologetic look.

“I’m so sorry! I know we only just met, but I feel bad just leaving.”

“It’s all right,” Anthy says with a smile. “I think perhaps I’d better start moving forward again as well.”

Kazuki’s smile is dazzling, and when he pushes the bag with pancakes in it towards her, Anthy does not argue. She follows them out of the shop, and waves as they run across the street.

“Himemiya-san!” Kazuki calls from the other side. “I’m sure your connection will make it to her!”

Anthy smiles again. She waves once more, and realizes that the miçanga has slid onto her wrist. She looks at it again.

_ A symbol of their connection _ , she thinks.  _ Perhaps this meeting was fate after all. _

Well, perhaps not fate, she thinks, as she moves on from the sidewalk, with Chuchu happily nibbling on a pancake. She’s not sure believes in that, not anymore. But connections — those, perhaps, she believes in.

Perhaps her connection to Utena led her here. Perhaps she needed to meet Kazuki and Enta, and hear about their connection. She looks down at the miçanga one more time. Then she keeps walking. The connection in her heart keeps her walking forward. Closer, and closer, she thinks.  _ Every step is closer to you. _


	10. I Want to Connect, but I Don't Know Where You Are

It’s more difficult than she thought it would be to find a place to sit down and eat her pancakes. She might as well have stayed in the restaurant. But the air feels nice and cool, and her feet don’t hurt yet, and she feels the miçanga lightly against her wrist like a promise — as though something of Kazuki’s unbridled optimism has left itself within it. The promise of a connection. It has nothing to do with her and Utena, and yet...it feels as though it might connect her to her, somehow. If only by the echo of Kazuki and Enta’s hope.

Chuchu squeaks, and points with his tail to a small alcove. That looks as good a spot as any. She edges out of the stream of people, and breaths easier once she’s in. Somehow, even though this little space is only a step away from the city’s bustle, it feels...quieter. As though the sounds are muffled, here. The light is shaded away by the tall buildings on either side, but it’s not an alleyway. It’s a small, three sided courtyard, with a garden in the corner that sports a tall, golden statue of what appears to be a kappa. It’s a shrine, of some kind.

And there’s someone standing in front of it. Anthy hesitates. Her shoe clicks on the stone, however, and the young man looks up.

He’s probably the same age as Kazuki and Enta, but his one visible eye looks much older, the other covered by a fringe of dark hair. Light freckles dust his pale skin, and he slouches slightly. One of his hands is shoved into his pocket, elbow holding his duffel bag against his back. The other holds his cell phone with the screen glowing.

For a moment, the two of them only stare at each other. Then he lets out a little huff.

“Am I in the way?” he says, his voice a little husky, like a man who hasn’t yet grown into his deepened voice.

Anthy crinkles her pancake bag against her chest.

“No,” she says. “I was only looking for a place to sit down.”

She glances up and down the courtyard — there’s no bench, but she could sit on the lip of the garden where the statue is.

“Though perhaps this isn’t the place to do so,” she says. “It seems to be a shrine.”

The young man shrugs.

“I wouldn’t worry about a curse. The real thing left this place ages ago.”

He says it so matter-of-factly. Anthy isn’t sure if she’s surprised or not. On one hand, she’s been privy to strange magic all her life. On the other, most others haven’t. She chooses not to address the question.

“I’ll be gone in a minute,” he says, turning back towards the statue. “I’m just...reminiscing.”

His voice gets soft, almost hurt. Anthy can hear the uncertainty in his voice, as though he’s not sure where he’s supposed to be. 

But she doesn’t ask. It isn’t in her nature to. And she has her own journey to complete.

“Well, I won’t interrupt you,” she says.

She walks past him, and settles herself on the edge of the stone off to the side. She opens up her bag of pancakes, and pulls one of the soft cakes out to begin nibbling on it. Chuchu continues to eat on her shoulder, quite please with the large chunk she gave him.

The silence drags between them. Anthy flicks a gaze here or there towards the young man. He doesn’t look at her. He’s busy staring at the statue, looking somehow much younger, and much older, than his age at the same time. He keeps looking down at his phone, as though waiting for something.

“Are you waiting for someone?”

The question comes from nowhere, and he looks just as surprised to have asked it as Anthy is to have heard it. She chews slowly while she considers.

“No,” she says. “I think...someone is waiting for me. So I’m going to find her.”

He looks down at the ground, stuffing his phone back into his pocket. He stands there, quietly, staring at the ground — or at nothing.

“I don’t think anyone is waiting for me,” he says. It comes out flat. But it also comes out chipped — as though he still believes in the possibility, but is too afraid to acknowledge that he does.

Anthy takes another bite of her pancake. She’s not sure what to say. Or what to think. Beneath the sleeve of her jacket, she can feel the miçanga brushing against her. Her eyes wander across the ground.

“There’s no way to know for sure,” she finally says. “Until you get to the place where you think they’re waiting for you. Then you find them there, or you don’t.”

He glances at her. She looks back at him, and tries to think about why this feels so familiar.

“And what if you don’t?” he asks.

Anthy tilts her head.

“Then you keep walking,” she says. “Or you don’t. I don’t know what your choice is.”

He holds her gaze a moment longer. Then he lets out a huge sigh like an explosion, closing his eyes.

“Okay,” he says. “What will  _ you _ do if you get there, and your friend isn’t waiting?”

Anthy hesitates. She considers. This...this has never occurred to her. Has it been too long? How long would Utena wait? And where would she go if she wasn’t waiting? What if Anthy searched forever, and never found her? 

The possibility is soul-shaking. She’s at a loss for words. 

Finally, she closes her eyes, and recomposes herself.

“How do you know for sure that they’re  _ not _ waiting?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Why would they wait for someone like me?”

Anthy keeps her eyes closed. She tries not to think about the new possibility ringing through her head. Would she never see Utena after all? Was she truly gone forever, not just gone from Akio’s world?

Maybe the connection they’d made wasn’t enough after all.

“Well,” she finally asks, breathing out, “why did you make them wait?”

The question rings in her mouth and in the air and in her head, and she wonders if it reverberates as much in his mind as it does in hers. She’s made Utena wait. Or perhaps, Utena is making Anthy wait. Perhaps they’re both waiting, wondering if the other will ever find them. If that’s how it’s been always.

He lets out another, sudden, explosive sigh.

“Dammit,” he whispers. “Fine.”

Anthy watches him as he turns around, and walks away back from the alcove. Her eyes drop almost automatically.

Just as he goes around the corner, she sees it. She sees his pant leg ride up from his ankle, and she sees miçanga tied there — old and worn and almost fraying apart, but still tied back together with a stubborn desperation to hold it together no matter what. Somehow, it makes her heart rise up in her throat, her eyes widen. She opens her mouth to call out.

He disappears from sight, and miçanga with him. Anthy stares at the place where he was. Then she looks up at the kappa statue beside her. 

Somehow, it doesn’t look like what she thought a kappa might look like. She can’t say why.

She and Chuchu finish their pancakes. She stands up, and dusts herself off. Then she picks up her suitcase, and returns to the hustle and bustle of the city. Her feet go without her. She’s not sure what’s possessed them. But if her body has sense some clue that she hasn’t, then she’s willing to bet on it. Or at the very least, she’s willing to do whatever it takes to walk off the terrible thoughts she’s been made to think about.

Her shoes click beneath her as she takes another random turn, and finds herself on a bridge. There are only a few people walking back and forth, all of them looking down or straight ahead as they rush, and Anthy slows. The smell of the water rises up to her, and she wanders to the railing, running her hand against it. The miçanga slides out from under her jacket sleeve, and it glitters softly in the light. The glitter makes her look up, and away.

She stops. She leans over the railing, so far that Chuchu nearly slides off and into the faraway water.

Down below, she can see shapes in the water. There are three of them — three dots, just far enough to not see them clearly, just close enough to recognize them as people. All three of them bob softly in the rise and fall of the water, and she can hear laughter rolling up towards her. One of the shapes grabs another, and then the other, and they all bounce and bob and splutter in a big hug.

The sun disappears behind a cloud, just enough to reduce the glint of the water, and she can see them.

Kazuki. Enta. And the boy from kappa courtyard, his face alight with a huge smile, as the three of them finally turn and paddle towards shore. 

The miçanga slides down her wrist again, and the sun comes back out to shimmer against it. When she looks down at it, it’s as though the light has bleached it — the orange and red has become white, and the bead is no longer a soccer ball.

It’s a white rose.

Anthy brings the miçanga up to her lips, closing her eyes and feeling the little bumps and ridges of the bead flower. Tears spring to her eyes.

_ “I know you’re going to meet her again.” _

Anthy opens her eyes, and watches the three soaked boys stumble onto the shore, each of them tumbling forwards, laughing as they continue to try to get ahold of each other in awkward hugs. Chuchu nuzzles her cheek.

“Thank you,” she whispers to the boys, though they’ll never hear her.

She turns, and she walks back down the bridge to the other side.

She and Utena will meet again. There is no question about it.

After all, both of them are still waiting to be found. And both of them are searching. This connection is worth more than anything.


	11. Where Lost People Go

Anthy steps off of the bridge. The miçanga hangs against her wrist, and she clings to the faint warmth that she imagines is within it. The promise of a meeting — of a connection reaching. She closes her eyes for a moment, and tries to feel it. The string that might be between her and Utena.

Her eyes open when Chuchu leaps from her shoulder and dives into a nearby bush.

“Chuchu?”

She steps forward, crouching down beside the bush with her suitcase on her knees. 

“Chuchu, what are you doing?”

A tiny shriek answers her, and a strange popping sound. Chuchu comes flying out of the bush and lands on Anthy’s suitcase on his back, staring up at the sky. In his little arms, he hugs half of a cucumber, which has clearly been snapped in half.

“Again?” she says, with an exasperated smile. “You just ate.”

Chuchu noms onto the end of the cucumber without sitting up. The bushes rustle, and Anthy looks up. 

_ Something _ darts out of the bushes. It’s large and round, and something glitters on its back. But it moves too quickly for her to catch exactly what it is. A rabbit? A squirrel? A very strange bird? She has no idea. And before she can stand and get a better look, the thing has turned over and rolled down the hill towards the river so fast that it’s nothing more than a white and purple blur. Anthy stares, lips parting.

The sound of feet pounding behind her catches her attention. She stands, scooping Chuchu up as she lets her suitcase back down to her side.

“God — dammit — where —  _ is _ — she —”

A man comes huffing and puffing to a stop nearby her, leaning over with his hands on his knees. His head is shaded by his woven straw hat, so that she can’t see his face, and he’s clad in one of the traditional uniforms of a rickshaw puller. When he stands, he shoves his hat back from his face so that it hangs by its string around his neck, and runs a hand through his light blond hair. The bangs fall back over his eyes, dark skin beaded with sweat from his exertion.

When his eyes zip around the area, they fall on Anthy. She draws back when he hurries over to her — as though he notices her flinch, he stops immediately, a good distance away from her.

“Hey, excuse me,” he says. “But have you seen a girl around here? Maybe around your age? In a sort of — kimono thing? Wearing a plate on her head?”

He gestures with both hands as though to sketch out the shape of the girl. Anthy has absolutely not seen such a girl — she would have remembered something like that.

“No, I don’t believe so,” she says.

“Dammit,” he groans. “Mabu’s gonna kill me.”

His eyes fall, for a moment, on Chuchu, who has taken up residence on her shoulder once again to nibble on his cucumber. He frowns, tilting his head.

“Sorry,” he says, “but uh. Weird question. Did you find that cucumber around here?”

Anthy blinks and looks at Chuchu. Then she looks at the bush.

“Yes, my friend found it in here,” she says, gesturing to the bush. “I think he may have gotten in a scuffle with some kind of animal for it.”

The man’s eyes shoot wide open, and he bolts over to the bushes. He pulls them open while Anthy dances off to the side, watching with a frown. Does he expect to see his missing girl in there?

“Sorry again!” he says, jumping up. “But did you see where it went?? The animal-thing, I mean!”

“Oh, it...it rolled towards the river,” Anthy says, pointing.

He smacks himself on the forehead as though he were dumb of nothing thinking that. 

“Thank you!!” he says. “Hey, here, take this — for your help!”

Before she can even open her mouth, he’s jumped forward, taking her free hand, and slapped a piece of paper into her hand. She clutches it automatically, but she steps forward, mouth opening to tell him that she doesn’t really need this, she didn’t help him — but he’s already bolting off, stumbling and swearing as one of his sandals nearly come off while he tries to run down the hill towards the river.

Anthy is left standing there, holding the slip of paper. She hesitates, staring after the man. 

And here she’d thought that very little could surprise her. It seems that she was mistaken.

After another beat, she looks down at the paper. It’s...it’s a ticket. For a rickshaw service. There’s a time and date on it for a city tour. She checks the date — it’s today. And the tour is in only thirty minutes from now. 

Still, it’s not as though she has the time to take a city tour in a rickshaw. She’s still searching for Utena, after all...

Her thumb slides along the ticket as she makes to tuck it away in her pocket, and she stops. She looks again. Is that...is that a rose logo?

She’s gone for lesser clues. Anthy checks the address on the ticket for the pick up point.

It takes her the full thirty minutes, wandering around the city and trying to find street signs, to find the rickshaw. There’s a man in the same uniform waiting at the handles, leaning against them and looking bored — it’s not the same man as before, this one looks quite a bit younger than the other.

He jumps up to his feet when Anthy approaches him with the ticket in hand.

“Am I too late?” she asks.

“No ma’am,” he says, accepting the ticket from her and glancing at the information. “Go on and climb aboard.”

Anthy steps up into the cart, settles her suitcase in by her feet, and leans back. The rickshawman takes up the bar, and begins to pull the cart forward. The wood wheels clatter against the stones, making Anthy jostle back and forth a bit, but once they start moving, it evens out. The rumble and rattle of the cart is somehow almost soothing.

They take a moment to get onto the next road, and when they do, the rickshawman begins to talk. 

The words slip around her like water, not quite filtering into her. She catches words about kappa, and long ago days when the city was flooded with water, and the statue that commemorates the kappa who saved them. People filter around on the streets, past the rickshaw, and her eyes try to focus on them only to find that they can’t.

The world isn’t all that it seems, and it never has been. Anthy isn’t sure, exactly, where she is. She’s left her bubble of a world behind, but perhaps there are other bubbles. Perhaps, just perhaps, there are a thousand hundred little worlds, just like hers, all tangled up together.

The city had felt so real before. Now, it seems more like a dream. As though getting on this cart was bringing her deeper in, away from the edge of reality she’d edged towards. As though now she’s finding her way deeper into another world that is and isn’t, like the world she left behind.

She can’t see faces, not as clearly as she could see Kazuki, Enta, and their friend. It’s as though nothing, and no one, perhaps, is quite real. The rickshawman talks about landmarks, but she doesn’t see them. She sees only colors, warping around her, the impression of buildings that flip over to show other buildings on their other side instead, and flip again to change the street once more into something else yet again.

She closes her eyes, and lets the rumble of the rickshaw rattle through her, grounding her. But grounding her to what?

Anthy was once a witch. Once, she tore the prince down from his throne, and the world...changed. Is this world a result of that? Or in the end, had she only made her own world after all, and the worlds out here play by different rules?

In that case, where has Utena gone?

Something doesn’t feel right. This world is real, isn’t it? Or is it only a dream? Has she been only dreaming all this time?

The rickshaw turns a corner. Faceless people are more like gray blobs than anything else. Her mind wanders. The street seems to change colors around her, the world flipping and switching in place. She’s not sure where she’s going — or if she’s going anywhere at all.

She fingers the rose bead around her wrist. She thinks of Utena.

Where would Utena go, if she’d left Ohtori?

Anthy feels a faint tugging at her chest as she touches the bead, and she clings to it, thinking about Utena as hard as she can. 

It hurts to think about her. She conjures up the image of Utena’s bright, innocent face, her smile, the smile of someone who has never been truly hurt. The feeling of her hand clinging to the hem of Anthy’s dress, stopping her, begging for her to stay, even after what...what she had...

Anthy chokes, and she hugs herself. The rickshawman keeps talking, as though he doesn’t know who he has in his cart.

Utena left, Anthy thinks. But when did she leave?

_ I’m sorry that I couldn’t become a prince _ .

Utena isn’t in the outside world. Not yet.

She isn’t in this city, this city that is so, so close to the edge of everything, to the edge of the bubble, too close to whatever “reality” might be. Utena was ready to leave Ohtori because she could no longer exist in the kind of world that Akio and Anthy had built. She didn’t belong to it.

But...but Utena was hurt.

Did she really know where she was going, when she left, after all?

Anthy feels a tear roll down her cheek. Her hands shake in her lap, and she stares at the rose bead, using it to try and ground her. Utena was hurt, at the end. Anthy had hurt her. But she’d reached out, tried to pull Anthy out anyway. And she’d been hurt, been struck down by the swords in Anthy’s place, and she’d disappeared.

Where would someone like that go after that? 

Anthy sucks in a breath as she understands.

Utena is lost.

She doesn’t know where she is, either. She’s waiting...she  _ must _ be waiting, for someone to find her. And where does a lost person go?

The rickshaw comes to a stop, and Anthy hesitates, looking over the side to the uncertain landscape beyond. Faceless people, like cardboard cutouts, wander back and forth down the sidewalk. Just ahead of her, a dark hole in the side of reality leads down a set of stairs, into the dark. A glowing sign for a train hangs over the top.

Anthy climbs down from the rickshaw, and when she turns around to thank the rickshawman, it is already gone. She turns, unsurprised, towards the entrance to the train.

A lost person, she thinks, walks deeper in. Farther away from the exit.

Anthy tightens her grip on her suitcase. Chuchu clings to her neck.

One step at a time, Anthy heads down into the dark.

Lost people need to find a way to stick together. And when they find each other, perhaps they’ll come back here. And perhaps they’ll find the exit to the maze — together.


	12. The Universe In Your Hand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi guys!! 
> 
> I wanted to drop a quick note here to first say: I hope you're all doing all right. I hope you are safe, that you're staying home, and that if you can't stay home that you are taking care of yourself out there. It's really scary looking in the world right now, and I don't know that there's much I can say in the way of morale boosting. 
> 
> I'm going to keep writing, and I am going to try my best to continue to have regular updates on this and other stories. I wanted to make sure I let you all know that this story is actually coming up to the end of my backlog that I had previously prepared, so it may be a little less regular as I start up writing new chapters again -- but I have no intention of leaving this story for long.
> 
> Thank you to all reading so far, and I wish safety, health, and happiness to you and your loved ones.

It’s easy to become lost. All you need to do is turn the wrong direction — and there are so many wrong directions. The train rattles beneath Anthy, as the world passes in streaks of light and tunnels of darkness.

Anthy’s been lost for a very long time. She didn’t even know she was. Utena probably doesn’t know she’s lost, either. 

Even at the end, she regretted not becoming a prince. Even at the end, Utena wasn’t ready to know where to go. And Anthy isn’t sure, either. Where do you go, when you’ve been lost for so long?

Perhaps you take a train. Where there’s only one direction to go.

Anthy tucks hair behind her ear, while Chuchu nibbles on his last remaining pancake. The world is big, she thinks. It’s bigger than she could have imagined. And for all she knows, she’s passed through multiple worlds. If there is more than one world, there’s no way to know which one Utena has gone to, or if she’s gone to any of them.

Anthy will have to be lost for a little bit longer.

It is the least she can do.

The seat in front of her creaks, and something moves against the top of it. She stirs from her thoughts, eyes moving away from the window.

Eyes meet hers, and for a moment, they only stare. She at the little boy, and the little boy at her. He clings to the back of the seat, sitting backwards on his knees in it so that he can see over the top, just his eyes peeking over the back. His messy, dark hair falls between his eyes, and he blinks. She blinks back.

Before she can ask, he pokes the rest of his head over the seat, and smiles at her.

“Hi,” he says.

“...hello,” she replies.

He beams at her, eyes lighting up.

“I just wanted to say you’re very pretty, miss,” he says. “Your hair looks nice.”

He can’t be older than five or six. And there’s such a naive authenticity to his compliments, that she smiles softly.

“Thank you,” she says.

He grins, eyes sparkling. Then he disappears behind the seat again. Anthy once more turns her eyes to the window. A pair of screens on either side of the car flicker on, and she glances up at them. An advertisement begins to play that she can’t quite hear from the middle of the car, featuring two cartoon girls in black outfits, with blue and pink hair. One of them hands an apple to the other, and they both begin to dance happily.

She hears the squeak of a sneaker, and looks down. The boy has walked around to her seat, now, leaning his hand up against the end. He has...an apple in the other hand.

“So where are you going?” he asks.

Anthy blinks. She tilts her head and thinks about whether to answer. He’s a child, but...it’s still a somewhat prying question.

“To meet a friend,” she answers. “What about you?”

He smiles so big that it almost seems to stretch his whole face.

“My brother and I are going to the very end of the line,” he says. “We’re going to meet someone there, too.”

“Oh?” Anthy says. 

“Uh-huh. She’s been waiting a while. We made her wait a long time. But it will be really good to see her again!”

Anthy smiles at his enthusiasm.

“I’m sure it will be,” she says. “I feel the same way about my friend.”

He beams.

“I hope you find her,” he says. “This train only goes one way, though. So make sure you find another way back when you find her!”

Her smile slips. She tilts her head, confused. Something about what he says...it makes her uncertain. As though he knows more than he lets on. Or as though...perhaps he isn’t... _ here _ .

“What is your apple for?” Anthy asks.

He blinks, and looks down at it. Then he smiles.

“Oh! This is the reward,” he says. “It’s a whole universe in your hand. See?”

Before she can say anything, he crawls onto the seat beside her, and takes her hand. He places the apple into her palm, and the two of them hold it together. Anthy’s lips part. Is it just her, or is the apple... _ warm _ ? As though it’s pulsing, alive?

“What is it a reward for?” she asks.

“It’s the reward for those who gave up themselves for love,” he says, very seriously, like a child telling an important secret.

“I see,” Anthy says, though she does not. It makes her feel strange in her stomach. She’s not sure what this conversation means.

She starts to let go, but the boy pushes her fingers around it, and lets go.

“I can’t take this,” Anthy says, as he crawls back off the seat and lands in the aisle.

He smiles, clasping his hands behind him.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “That one isn’t mine. I think it must be yours.”

“My...what?”

He only laughs like a young boy, dancing backwards. She starts to stand out of her seat.

The door on the other end of the car opens. The boy looks, and so does she. A second boy, the same age, appears, with messy red hair falling over his forehead.

“Shoma,” he calls. “Let’s go.”

The boy nods, and turns back to Anthy. He smiles once more.

“When you find your friend, don’t forget to tell her!”

He runs towards the door with the other boy, and Anthy stands, stepping out into the aisle. She steps back before she trips over a trio of small, lumpy creatures waddling past her, hurrying after the boys — are those...penguins?

“Don’t forget to tell her what?” she calls.

The two boys pause in the doorway, as the penguins hurry past them into the next car. Both of them grin.

“Everything you want her to know,” the red-haired boy says.

The boys step back into their car, and the door slides shut in front of them. Anthy leaves Chuchu on the seat for a moment, running to the other end. She pulls the door open.

There’s no one in the next car. Not the boys, not anyone. She stares a moment longer, the apple warm in her hand. Then she closes the door, and returns to her own empty car. She walks back to her seat. 

She stares down at the apple for a long, long moment.

Then, softly, she sets it inside her suitcase, and closes it up.

“This train is only one way, is it?” she whispers. “All right.”


	13. Who We Were Before

Chuchu clings to Anthy’s shoulder while the train comes to another stop. The train has stopped five times, now, but she’s not sure when she wants to get off. When will she feel like she’s deep enough to find where Utena might be? When will she feel like she’s close?

She leans her elbow against the window, watching people she can’t recognize filter off into the train station. She can see their faces, even if she doesn’t know who they are. This world is too real, she thinks. She’s too close to the outside for Utena to be here.

At least, she thinks so until a man moves out of the way of the stairs, and she sees a small blue lump sitting on the step. She sits up. Is that...?

The penguin turns around, nibbling on a banana. It tosses the peel onto the step, and then begins to hop each step one at a time. That’s one of the penguins she saw...

Anthy grabs her suitcase and holds Chuchu against her shoulder to prevent him from falling. She bolts down the car, and stumbles through the doors and onto the station at the last minute. She does not read the signs to where she is. She only hops up the stairs where she saw the penguin go, careful to avoid the banana peel.

She hurries up the steps, heels clicking, until she steps free of the station and into the light. She shades her eyes, turning around for some sign of the penguin. It might not mean anything at all, she thinks. But it might also...

She stops. Her hand slowly drops down to her side.

To his credit, he doesn’t seem as though he’s expected to see her. His eyes widen, and his lips part, his body freezing in place like hers.

People pass between them, and yet, they still stare at each other. 

He finds his words first — for him to be speechless so long is somehow startling.

“Himemiya Anthy?” he asks.

His voice startles her back to herself, and she feels a strange, uncertainty crawling through her.

“Kiryuu Touga?”

*

He looks different. Anthy thinks that again as she looks at him across the table between them. It’s only a few feet, but it somehow feels like miles.

He leans his elbows against the table, twiddling his thumbs, not looking at her, or touching the tea he’s ordered. He pushes his hair back over his shoulders, where he’s tied it into a low ponytail.

_ We’ve sat like this before _ , she thinks.  _ Once, a long time ago. _

Back then, he’d sat across from her as her engaged — while he spoke on the phone with another girl, telling her sweet nothings. He’d avoided her gaze. He’d avoided speaking to her. She’d walked behind him always, sat across from him as told, but she’d avoided his gaze, too. They’d done everything in their power then, to not to acknowledge that the other one was there.

Anthy never took the moment to think about why, until now. Until this moment, where both of them have trouble meeting the other’s gaze, where Touga can’t stop playing with his hair or fiddling with his hands, as though he’d rather be anywhere other than here, for once, unstable and uncertain, like the child he is. And her, sitting straight and feeling distant. Feeling both here, and not here. Feeling as though she’s never met him before.

Perhaps, because she hasn’t. This Anthy, the one she has become, has never truly met him. And perhaps it is the same for him. Perhaps they are truly meeting for the first time.

“You look...good,” he finally says. “Your hair looks lovely like that.”

There isn’t any of his usual flirtations in his voice. It’s simply an observation.

“Thank you,” she says. She doesn’t pay him any compliments back. “When did you leave?”

“After Nanami.”

She nods. For a moment, they sit in silence.

“How long have I been gone?” she asks.

He blows out through his lips, runs a hand through his bangs again.

“Who knows?” he says. “The world in there is different than the ones out here.”

“How long have you been gone?” she asks instead.

“Not long at all.”

His eyes flicker over his shoulder, as though he expects to see the gate of Ohtori behind him — she recognizes the nervous motion, the one that she’s found herself making more than once. As though the school might follow them wherever they are. When he looks forward again, this time, their eyes meet. Anthy holds that gaze for just a moment, and thinks.

Kiryuu Touga. She’d never known him. She’d never bothered to care. He was Akio’s project, after all. She had to do nothing for him, except to be the Rose Bride. Even as Mamiya, she’d done little to understand him. She’d only chosen to examine the ones who  _ wanted _ to understand him, deciding on Keiko in the end as her target. But he himself? 

She never looked at him.

“I feel as though I should apologize,” he starts.

“Don’t,” Anthy says. “We both know there’s no point. And I’d...rather not hear it.”

He frowns. But to his credit, he does not push. He doesn’t try to insist. He only nods, and looks down at the table.

“The truth is, I don’t know where to go from here,” he says. “I haven’t seen a familiar face since you.”

She stirs her tea, and blows against the heat. A strange, clawing sensation rises up in her chest at his words. She inhales, and exhales, trying to expel it from her.

“Not even Nanami?”

He shakes his head.

“She actually finally left me,” he says with a wry smile. “I don’t know that I blame her. She’s finding a way without me. Better than I ever did.”

Somehow, that surprises Anthy more than anything. Nanami left without Touga. And she didn’t look back. Anthy swirls her tea softly. Perhaps she never needed to worry about Nanami, after all.

He finally cups his tea in his hands, staring down at it. The city hums around them, real and unreal, the two of them who are there and perhaps aren’t.

“I left,” he says, almost as though it doesn’t make sense to him. “But I...wonder who I am outside of it.”

Anthy stares into her tea. Then at her hands, where she rests them on the table.

She’s tried to focus on Utena. On finding her, the lost girl who showed her the way out. She’s tried to focus on only her.

She’s tried not to focus on herself. When she does, she feels the broken glass and clotted hair that makes up her insides, the parts of her that she’s afraid to look closely at. 

“And what about you?” he asks. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t owe you an answer.”

He actually chuckles, shaking his head as he leans back in his chair.

“That’s right,” he says. “You don’t.”

He tilts his head, and a faint smile comes to his lips — it’s not the same smile, she thinks. There’s pain, and sadness in it.

“You really do look much more...yourself,” he says. “It’s heartening.”

She runs her thumb over the edges of her nails, trying not to look at him. Because when she does, she sees it — every bit of herself she’s tried not to make the focus of her journey. The parts of her she hasn’t yet tried to uncover and understand. The parts of her that are still there — still back in Ohtori.

“I don’t feel like myself,” she says in spite of herself. “I don’t know what myself is.”

She didn’t mean to say it out loud. She tenses, waiting for him to say something. But hes says nothing at all. He stirs his tea. He takes it by the rim up to his lips.

“I didn’t want to ever admit it, back then,” he says. “But I think I knew. How much we were the same.”

Anthy hates it, the way that the thought coils up inside her and cracks at her raw edges, but she understands. The same feeling had been coming to her.

“That doesn’t mean either of us should ask or owe forgiveness,” she says.

“No, it doesn’t,” he says. “It’s only an observation.”

He sips at his tea again. She stares at hers. The clink of glasses and silverware against plates echoes through the open air cafe.

“I’ve spent a good chunk of my life making plans, and schemes, and walls,” he says. “I don’t know who I am without them. But I left, anyway. I learned enough to leave.”

She finally looks up at him. His eyes are still guarded, she realizes. He left Ohtori. But not all of him, yet. And she’s not sure if she hates it or not to find the squeezing in her chest is understanding.

“So I suppose the journey is all about finding who I am now,” he says.

Anthy and Touga stare at each other for a long moment. Then she nods.

“Perhaps it is,” she says. “And you won’t always like what you find.”

A faint smile quirks at his lips, one that looks much more like the one she knows.

“I’ve found I’ve hated most of what I found,” he says. “But...I think it was better than not finding it.”

She nods. Her chest is still full of broken glass and dying things. Things she hasn’t let herself look at. But she will. And she must. Utena might be her goal, but this journey isn’t just for Utena, is it?

It’s for her, herself. And it always has been.

“I kept thinking, maybe I would have liked the chance to do things differently,” Touga says. “At least, until I saw you.”

He takes another sip, finally looking straight at her.

“Then I realized that wishing for the past to be different is fruitless. All we can wish for is for the future to be different.”

Anthy raises an eyebrow at him.

“Don’t think you’re wise just because you managed to leave,” she said.

He actually smiles. A soft laugh rippled the surface of his tea. Then he downs the last of it all at once, and stands up.

“It was good to see you,” he says, and he actually sounds like he means it.

“I’m not sure I can say the same,” she says.

He smiles bigger this time, and laughs softly.

“You know, I think I actually like you better when you do things just for yourself,” he says. He hesitates one last moment, his hand lingering on the table. “Good luck. I hope you find her.”

She sucks in a breath. Then she lets it out. She supposes she shouldn’t be surprised he figured out what she’s looking for. Touga is smart, after all — he’s like her.

“Do you have anything you want her to hear?” she asks.

He only smiles, sadly.

“I don’t think I have anything to say she’d  _ want  _ to hear,” he says. “But...perhaps I’ll get to meet her again myself someday. And tell her thank you.”

He smiles one last time. He looks at Chuchu, eating sugar packets beside Anthy’s tea cup, and pats him on the head. Then, without a goodbye, he turns, and he walks away.

Anthy doesn’t watch him go. She looks down at her tea. Then she takes the cup, and drinks the rest of it down. The scalding heat rushes through her, sizzling at the broken things within her.

She stands and scoops Chuchu away from another sugar packet.

The broken things...she’ll deal with them. But she’ll deal with them at her own pace.

This journey is for that, she thinks. It’s for finding Utena. But it’s for finding herself, too. 


	14. Girls of Fate

Her feet hurt again. But there is nowhere she’s ready to stop.

Anthy walks on, moving past faceless people, gray shapes that she doesn’t recognize or rather, doesn’t try to recognize. She glances fleetingly at windows, but only sees her own reflection in them, eyes skating over the items that lay inside. All she sees are her own eyes, looking back at her with a deep exhaustion, windows into the shattered space of her heart, the space that Touga’s presence reminded her was there.

She needs to think about it. To start to look closer at it. But she’s not...she’s not ready.

She stops looking into windows.

Her suitcase isn’t very heavy anymore, but it still makes her arms ache from carrying it, no matter how many times she switches hands. 

_ How much farther _ , she finds herself thinking.  _ How much farther? _

She feels so far away — somehow, she feels even farther away from her goal than when she began. Could she have somehow turned around? Is her mind telling her that she wasn’t going forward anymore, that she’d lost track of herself, that in fact Utena wasn’t this direction? She hasn’t seen another clue in ages. Maybe she was wrong — maybe going in deeper was the wrong decision.

She wishes she would just stop thinking. The more she thinks, the more she worries, the easier it is for the darker thoughts to slip into her mind. The ones that tell her that she was stupid for leaving. That she doesn’t know for sure Utena is out here. That she doesn’t know for sure that Utena even wants to see her. That she has made a mistake.

It’s getting hard to breathe. She needs to stop and take a rest. It’s so  _ hot _ . Her clothes cling to her skin, her hair to her forehead, and she’s panting. She needs to rest — but she’s afraid of stopping. If she stops, the thoughts will catch up with her. They’ll find her, and she’ll turn around and find Ohtori right at her heels, having not actually take a single step forward at all — 

Chuchu shrieks. She stops automatically, startled from her thoughts at the sound. Her vision clears, and she realizes all at once that she’s been walking in a daze, not even seeing where she is stepping. It’s a wonder she hasn’t run into anyone or anything.

Chuchu launches himself off her shoulder, and her lips part.

“Chuchu?”

Chuchu grabs something off the ground, a piece of paper as big as he is, and darts after something, around the corner. Panic seizes her — where is he going?? She hurries forward, rounding the corner.

On the other side, she blinks. Chuchu stands on the pavement, tail twitching and waving the paper up and down. The penguin — because that’s what it is, it’s one of the penguins she saw before — turns around at Chuchu’s yelling. It has a stack of similar sized papers in its flippers — no, not paper, Anthy realizes, blinking with even more surprise. The penguin is carrying a stack of photographs. Specifically, photographs of women in bikinis.

Chuchu waves the photograph at the penguin, jumping up and down. He points with his tail at a few others scattered over the ground. The penguin stares unblinking at him.

Anthy smiles, her panic subsiding.

“Chuchu, were you just trying to tell it that it had dropped its pictures?”

Chuchu turns towards her and nods. She crouches down and gathers up the last few photos. She has no idea why a penguin would want such things, but she takes the one Chuchu is holding, and stacks up the lost photographs, setting them gently on top of the penguin’s stack.

“There you go,” she says.

The penguin only stares. She stares back. For a long moment, nothing happens.

Then the penguin blinks once. It turns around, and begins to march off again. Anthy rises and watches it go. 

No one else seems to notice it — not a single person on the sidewalk looks down at it, and not even the cat sitting on a nearby windowsill even glances at it. When it gets a bit away, however, Anthy watches as another photo flutters off of its stack and lands on the pavement behind it. It keeps walking, as though it hasn’t noticed. She sighs.

Chuchu squeaks, and she looks down at him.

“Are you going to try and pick them all up for it?”

Chuchu stares without expression. She sighs. But she nods, and reaches down a hand to pick up Chuchu again and let him scrabble to her shoulder. They follow the penguin. Every now and then, she reaches down to pick up another photograph that flew away from the stack. She has a stack of about ten of them when the penguin takes another corner. Where is it going, anyway?

She rounds the corner — and stops.

Her eyes scan the sidewalk. Where did the penguin go? She turns back and forth, and even looks up, even though she knows that penguins can’t fly. It can’t be that fast, can it? And there’s hardly anyone on the sidewalk at the moment, so she can’t just be missing it. Where did it go?

She takes a tentative step forward, frowning as she glances back and forth. Where could it have gone? She pauses and looks into the nearest window. 

Past her reflection, there’s a mannequin. It’s wearing a wedding dress. 

The silence in her mind at the sight of it is louder than any scream she could have made. The dress is white, not red. But the large skirt and tight bodice are at the very least, familiar in silhouette. Seeing her own face, reflected on the mannequin’s, making it look for a moment as though she is wearing it — it makes her want to recoil. It makes her want to step towards it. It makes her not sure what she feels at all. 

All she knows for sure is that she knows the word attached to the dress, to the person who will wear it, and the word sends ripples of a slow seeping oil through her veins that makes it difficult to breathe. 

Is it fear, that she feels, confronting such a symbol of the title she left behind? Is it a strange, perverse longing for the simplicity of that role, where the path was set out for her and all she needed to do was walk forward, and never think of where else she might go? Is it anger, to be reminded once again of everything she once was, and everything she does not want to see in herself even still?

Or is it nothing more than the yawning emptiness that comes with remembering where she’d come from, and not knowing what that meant for what was ahead of her?

“Wow! What a pretty dress!”

The voice startles her from her thoughts, and all at once, the dress is only a dress again. She turns.

At her side, a young girl has bounced to the window, pressing both hands and her nose to the glass to get a better look at it, away from the glare of the sun against the glass. She is young, perhaps the same age as the form Anthy takes, thirteen, maybe fourteen. Her orange-blond hair falls in a wave down her back, stark against the color of the light blue dress that flounces about her knees. When she pulls back from the window, looking up to see Anthy watching her, hazel eyes glitter at her out of a pale face.

Anthy feels an odd sensation — like a gear clicking into place in her head, or the sound of notes briefly playing across a piano. The girl’s lips part, and she blinks, as though somehow, she’s felt the same thing. For a brief moment, the pair of them only stare at each other.

The girl blushes and breaks the stare first.

“I’m so sorry!” she says. “I don’t mean to stare!”

She tilts her head, and begins to nervously brush at her hair with her fingers, smiling sheepishly.

“It’s only...it’s so odd! For a moment, I almost felt like I’d seen you somewhere before.”

Anthy blinks and stirs.

“How...strange,” she says. “For a moment, I think I felt the same.”

The girl straightens up, eyes widening.

“Really?  _ Have  _ we met before?”

Anthy shakes her head. But she bites her lip. There is something so odd crawling beneath her skin. It’s...nostalgia? It’s the sort of feeling of remembering a beloved childhood meal that you haven’t had in years. But for what? She  _ knows _ she has never met this girl before in her life. She remembers those who walked through Ohtori, and this girl has never once been there.

It’s...a familiarity. As though, for a moment, her soul recognized something. Which makes no sense to Anthy — this small, bright looking girl seems as different from her as possible. There’s a glitter of trust, of hope in her eyes, an open and accepting smile that Anthy doesn’t think she’s ever known so intimately. Anthy learned, once, how to read the kinds of souls that she should lure into Ohtori, the kinds she should let go, and the kinds she should keep, to further their game. But this girl has the sort of openness, the raw innocence of hope and belief in the world — no, more than that, nothing so simple, it’s a hope tempered by understanding, a hope that had seen the depths of the world and come out knowing that the world was broken, and yet not giving into it — that would never let her enter Ohtori, the kind of soul too open to herself, too frank with herself, to be easily led. This was someone who  _ believed _ , in a way that Anthy was still afraid to.

“I think I would remember,” she says.

The girl tilts her head, as though still trying to place her.

“I suppose I probably would too,” she says. “But...it really does feel strange.”

She smiles, then, and curtseys politely with a flourish of her blue skirt.

“Perhaps our meeting was simply fate,” she says. “My name is Takakura Himari.”

Anthy hesitates, and then bows slightly back.

“I’m Himemiya Anthy.”

Himari bounces back up, and smiles with such a bright openness that it almost stings a little, because it is the kind of smile Anthy can only dream of feeling the desire to smile.

“There! Now we  _ have _ met before!” she says.

Anthy find a slight smile lifting to her lips. It’s almost contagious, her smile.

“I suppose we have.”

Himari looks up at the dress in the window again, and Anthy finds her eyes drawn to it as well. Once again, that strange feeling rises up in her chest.

“Were you window shopping?” Himari says. “It’s a pretty dress.”

“I...suppose it is.”

Anthy tries not to look at it. For all that she can see in Himari’s eyes, she doesn’t know how much the girl can see in hers. Can she tell the mixture of longing and revulsion that stirs within Anthy’s broken-glass soul to be confronted with such a symbol of what lay behind her? Can a soul like hers understand the depths and tangles of Anthy’s own? 

“Do you plan on becoming a bride one day?” Himari asks.

Anthy shivers in spite of herself — despite the heat, she feels a chill against the back of her neck, as though the ghost of Ohtori is right against her, and if she turns around, she’ll see the gate staring at her again, threatening to sheathe her once more in that hated dress.

“I don’t think so,” she says stiffly.  _ Never again _ , she doesn’t say aloud.

Himari doesn’t seem surprised by Anthy’s response.

“I don’t think I do, either,” she says thoughtfully.

Anthy blinks. Her lips part. She glances at Himari. 

Himari stares up at the dress, her hands clasped behind her back. A faraway, thoughtful look rests in her eyes, a far cry from the bright openness from before. For the first time since their brief meeting began, Anthy can’t read her. She can’t even begin to guess at the deep corridors that the girl is currently wandering through in her mind.

“It’s pretty,” she says again. “But in a way that seems...”

She doesn’t finish the sentence. Anthy doesn’t know how to finish it, either, but something in her bones feels as though she understands. She looks at the dress again. It really is nothing at all like the Rose Bride’s dress.

Himari claps her hands together, and the moment fades into dust.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, laughing and shaking her head. “Here I am, just having met you, and I’m saying such strange things.”

“I assure you that I have heard stranger,” Anthy says, with a smile.

Himari giggles, hiding it behind one hand — for all the good it does her, as it spills out of every inch of her.

“Himari-chan! Wait up!”

The new voice draws both their attentions, and a girl perhaps a few years older than Himari appears, red in the face from running. She pushes the short strands of her brown hair from her face, shoulders heaving.

“When I said I’d catch up, I didn’t mean to go down two blocks without me!” 

“Ah, sorry, Ringo-chan,” Himari says with a laugh.

The girl called Ringo looks up at Anthy then, blinking.

“Oh, sorry,” she says. “Is this a friend of yours, Himari-chan?”

“No, no,” Anthy starts, but Himari speaks over her.

“Yes!” she says, bright and smiling. “Well, we only just met, but — this is Himemiya Anthy-san! Anthy-san, this is Oginome Ringo!”

Ringo glances between Anthy and Himari. Then she flashes Anthy a sort of knowing smile, the kind that generally comes with elbow nudges.

“She bowled you right over right from the start, didn’t she?” Ringo says, shaking her head. “It’s hard to stop her when she puts her mind to something.”

“Ringo-chan!” Himari says, pouting.

A smile springs to Anthy’s lips, before she can stop it. She can’t remember...has anyone besides Utena ever called her a friend so readily? She isn’t used to being around people like this...and yet, somehow, she wants to be.

“It’s nice to meet you, at any rate,” Ringo says, bobbing her head in a small bow. “I hope Himari-chan didn’t interrupt you or anything while she was on her friend-making mission.”

Ringo pushes lightly on Himari’s head as she says this, getting a raspberry from Himari in response. Anthy can’t restrain the small laugh that escapes her.

“No, not at all,” she says. “It’s very nice to meet the both of you.”

“Oh, oh!” Himari says, jumping up. “You should come to lunch with us!”

“Himari, you shouldn’t overwhelm people,” Ringo says.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly intrude on your time out,” Anthy starts.

Himari, however, is clearly not going to hear it. She grabs Anthy’s hand with both of hers, and her grip is warm and soft.

“No, no!” Himari says. “We were just about to eat, and you look hungry! You should really join us! I’d love to have a chance to talk to you some more!”

Anthy tries to protest again, but Ringo sighs and shakes her head. The look she gives Anthy over Himari’s head seems to mean ‘she isn’t going to stop til she hears a yes.’

And...well, if Anthy is truly honest with herself, which is a difficult thing for her to be...she wants to. It’s the same joyful feeling of welcomeness she felt when Kazuki and Enta invited her along. Perhaps...perhaps these are people she was meant to meet. Or even if they aren’t, and the world is one game of chance after all, perhaps this is simply something...something that she can allow herself. She is allowed to meet new people. To stop with them. To learn more about them. To learn more about  _ herself _ .

Utena is waiting for her but...wasn’t it Utena who always wanted her to make friends? Would she begrudge Anthy the wait?

The thought is so silly that the moment she thinks it, she shakes her head. Hadn’t she just realized that this journey was for herself, as well?

She smiles, and squeezes Himari’s hand.

“All right,” she says. “I would be grateful.”


	15. The Worlds Only They Know

The cafe is small, and they are the only ones there. Himari squishes Ringo into a booth, and Anthy sits across from them, Chuchu perched on her shoulder. His stomach growls loudly. She pats him on the head to tell him to be patient.

“Who’s your friend, there?” she asks, looking at Chuchu.

It startles Anthy for a moment, and it takes her a moment to realize why. It comes to her after a beat — Himari may be the first person she’s ever known to call Chuchu her friend rather than her pet, without having to be corrected. It brings a faint smile to her lips.

“This is Chuchu,” she says, holding out her hand to let him scramble into it, letting him onto the table. “He’s my traveling partner.”

Himari lets out a little squeak of delight as she reaches out to scratch his head. Chuchu, for his part, soaks up the attention. Anthy shakes her head at him.

“You’re so soft!” Himari coos. “We’ll have to get you a montblanc, too.”

Anthy laughs softly, but it puts a strange warmness into her heart. It reminds her of days around a low table in a small student dorm, as she laid out tea cups and pre-bought biscuits, while Utena tickled Chuchu’s belly. It feels...all right.

Oh. What an peculiar feeling. To be all right. To be in a world where she can sit in nothing but the thought of being here, with friendly people who know nothing of her, that she knows nothing of. No plans. No schemes. No false faces.

_ This must be why Utena wanted me to make friends _ , Anthy thinks, watching Ringo give Chuchu a little skritch behind the ears.

“You really should try the montblancs here,” Ringo says. “They’re really good!”

“I’ve never had one before,” Anthy admits.

Ringo beams, and orders one for each of them. Himari leans on the table with her elbows, her chin resting on her hands.

“Ah,” Himari says, leaning back in her booth with her arms outstretched. “It’s such a nice day today!”

“You say that every day,” Ringo says with a smile and raised eyebrows, leaning her face onto her hand.

“Because it is, isn’t it? It’s always a nice day when you’re awake and alive and surrounded by friends!”

Her face shines as she says this, and it’s easy to believe that she means every word of it. Such a thought has never passed through Anthy’s mind, not once in her many years of life — such an appreciation for the breath in her lungs, or the sun in the sky. Up til now, it has always seemed so fake. So beyond her notice. But the way Himari says it makes Anthy want to see it the same way she does. She looks out through the window beside them, into the sky above, blue and clear as though clouds had never existed.

“You two seem to be very close,” she says, wondering what else to say. “Have you known each other long?”

“Only a few weeks, actually,” Ringo says, which startles Anthy. Ringo smiles, as though she saw it in Anthy’s face. “It surprises everyone we meet.”

“I apologize,” Anthy says, cheeks warming. “The two of you seem as though you’ve known each other for much longer.”

“It really feels that way sometimes!” Himari says, leaning forward onto the table again. “It’s actually a very funny story!”

Warm cups of tea appear on the table before them, steaming and smelling of peppermint. Himari twists hers in its saucer.

“We both passed out on the same train,” she says. “I don’t even remember taking it, actually.”

“Neither do I,” Ringo says, dropping her chin in her hands. “But one way or another, we woke up next to each other.”

Some strange, faraway look overcomes them — as though they have slipped away into another world, one that Anthy can’t possibly imagine.

“To be honest, the last few months were kind of a blur, so it’s not surprising,” Ringo says, waving a hand as she comes back to herself. “My parents were getting divorced. I don’t remember a lot — I think I was pretty worked up about it.”

Still, she frowns, brow furrowing ever so slightly at the montblanc before her, as though it reminds her of something as distant and wispy as a cobweb.

Himari is quieter — slower to return from the world inside her head. Anthy can see something in her eyes, something familiar — was this, perhaps, the familiarity she felt from Himari when their eyes first met? She can see something she understands.

Something a little like the look of someone who has left something behind.

“In any case,” she says, eyes clearing. “After that, we became friends. We’ve been meeting up to hang out ever since.”

She takes a sip of her tea. Anthy cups her own, letting the heat spread over her hands.

“What about you, Himemiya-san?” Himari says. “What brings you out here today?”

Anthy hesitates with the tea at her lips. Chuchu has already eaten half of her montblanc. The heat of the curls over her cheeks, her face. It smells like roses. She sets it down, without taking another sip.

“I’m looking for someone,” she said. “I’m on my way to meet her.”

Ringo tilts her head, as though waiting for Anthy to continue. But Himari only smiles, as though she somehow understands. Her hand slides across the table, and gently touches Anthy’s.

“Do you think she’s very far?” she asks.

Anthy stares down into her tea, looking at her own wobbly reflection in its dark depths.

“I don’t know.”

Himari’s smile softens, and she squeezes Anthy’s fingers gently.

“I’m sure you’ll find her,” she said. “I’m sure it will be soon.”

* * *

“You didn’t need to walk me to the station.”

“It’s fine! I wanted to!”

Himari hops down each step one at a time, practically bursting with life, as though she can’t simply walk like a normal person — there is just too much living pouring out of her. It’s a little like walking next to a beam of sunlight, Anthy thinks.

Himari hops to the last step and turns, spinning to face Anthy with her hands clasped behind her back.

“Are you sure you can’t stay longer?”

Anthy can’t help but smile. Himari has that effect on her. She reaches the bottom of the steps beside the girl. Ringo parted with them earlier, having a promise to meet her parents. But Himari, she decided to come along with Anthy, walking her to the nearest train station.

“I have a feeling I’ve done what I needed to do here,” Anthy said. “And my...my friend can’t be left waiting forever.”

Himari nods, though she smiles with disappointment. She turns, leading the way into the empty subway station. Anthy gives only a passing glance over her shoulder, back towards the light at the top of the stairs.

She isn’t lying. She thinks that she’s done all she needed to do here. She has an itch in her feet, the one that tells her its time to start walking again. She’ll try the train again — this time, perhaps, she’ll take it all the way to the end, to the last stop, and see if Utena might be there.

Himari wanders over to the very edge of the gap over the tracks, her toes barely hanging over the edge. She doesn’t seem at all concerned about possibly falling over the edge. Anthy, for her part, stands back, stopping at the yellow line.

“Are you sure this is the line you need to take?” Himari asks.

Anthy couldn’t explain why, but she thinks that no matter what train she took, it would be the right one.

“I think I’ll find my way,” she says.

Like so much else, Himari seems to understand. It’s somehow relieving — it is the first time Anthy has ever been with a person who has seemed to understand the things she can’t explain. That’s their connection, she thinks. They are the kind of people who have been through the kind of dreams that makes it easier to understand that which can’t be explained. They are the kind of people who have walked through worlds that don’t exist, worlds that only they will ever truly know.

For a long moment, they stand in the quiet dimness of the empty station. The empty tunnels yawn in either direction. Anthy isn’t sure which direction the train will come from, but she’ll board it regardless. Himari leans back and forth from her heels to her toes, finally sliding away from the very edge to stand beside Anthy. Anthy wonders, for a moment, if Himari might wait for her until the train arrives.

“I don’t know that I was entirely honest with you in the cafe,” Himari says.

Anthy looks across at her, but Himari’s eyes are somewhere else - her gaze is on something Anthy can’t see. In the silence of the train station, in the emptiness, where there is nothing but the two of them, Anthy can almost feel the weight of the worlds they have inhabited curling around them. She doesn’t know what world Himari has escaped from — only that she  _ has  _ escaped. That she is accustomed to the descent into the darkness and the unknown — and familiar with the ascent back out.

That’s the thing that connects them. They aren’t just the ones who have walked in the worlds that only they know. They are the ones who made it out. 

“I mean, it’s true that I don’t remember anything. I don’t remember how I got into that train car. I don’t remember why I was with Ringo-chan. But...”

Her breath escapes her, disappearing into silence.

“I know one thing,” she says. “Something that I can only feel.”

She clasps her hands against her heart, fingers entwining, and closes her eyes. She has gone somewhere far away, Anthy knows. Her body still stands in the station with Anthy, but “Himari” is far away.

“There are lost threads, tying me to a life I never lived,” she says. “To people who never existed.”

Her eyes crack open, and it feels for a moment as though the stars of a place far from here are caught in her long eyelashes.

“I can feel the pieces they left to me. I can feel their love,” she says. She turns her hands out, palms up, as though waiting to catch a snowfall that will never come. ‘I am made of every person who ever loved me.”

She returns. Her eyes clear, and she turns to Anthy, hands still outstretched. More out of instinct than anything else, Anthy puts one of her hands into Himari’s, and lets the girl clasp her hand in both of hers.

“That love reminds me that they, whoever they were, whatever they meant to me, they wanted me to live,” she said. “So I’m going to keep living. As much as I can. Not just for me, but for the ones my heart is made of.”

Anthy sucks in a soft breath, and she thinks, for a moment, that she can feel the apple in her suitcase begin to beat, warm and red like a living heart. Tears that aren’t hers come to her eyes.

Himari smiles, and curls Anthy’s fingers into hers for a moment.

“I don’t know who you’re looking for at the end of the line,” she says. “But make sure you keep living. For them, and for you.”

Anthy feels something in her soften. She curls her fingers into Himari’s.

“I’m glad I was able to meet you,” she says. “And I hope that you meet the ones you’re looking for someday, too.”

Himari beams, her eyes soft and warm, and Anthy once again feels that connection, that understanding that it seems only they can understand. They are alike in ways that they can never put into words.

Himari smiles, and releases Anthy’s hand. She pushes one hand into her bag.

“I wasn’t sure who I was making this for, but now I think I know,” she says. “Take this with you.”

She holds out the supple knitted yarn of...a scarf. It is soft, striped like a peppermint with thick red and white.

“I can’t,” Anthy says automatically, but Himari is already pressing the folds into Anthy’s hands.

“Please,” she says. “Someday, I’ll go there too. To the other end of the line, where I’m sure they’re waiting for me. Perhaps then, we’ll meet again, too!”

Her hands float away from Anthy’s, and she dances back, too far away to easily return the scarf. Anthy knows she won’t succeed in returning it, so she only smiles, a soft, somehow sad thing. It occurs to her that perhaps she won’t ever see Himari again.

“Thank you,” she calls after her, though the words seem so inadequate to all she wants to say. All she wants to know. What world did Himari once walk? From where did she escape? And is she free, now, or is she, too, still wandering, like Anthy is? Is Himari somehow in the outside world  _ and _ within this world Anthy wanders all at once? If so...how? Anthy wants to know, the ache tasting of smoke on her tongue.

But she doesn’t ask, because she knows Himari won’t be able to answer. Whether she truly remembers her other life, her other worlds, the way Anthy does or not — her escape was her own. Her answers are her own. 

Anthy’s must be her own, as well. They cannot walk the same path. They can only meet for a moment, for a breath, at the intersections.

Himari hops onto the first step, and twirls around, once more smiling at Anthy as the faraway sunlight illuminates her outlines. Her name means something about sunshine, Anthy recalls. It suits her.

“When you find her,” Himari calls, “when you come back — let’s meet for tea and montblancs again. Introduce me to her!”

Anthy feels her eyes soften. She nods, raising a hand in farewell, clutching the scarf to her chest with the other hand. 

“I will.”

It’s a promise she doesn’t know if she can keep. And yet, unlike most promises she has made, it feels like a good one.

Himari smiles once more, waving. Then she is gone, returning back up the stairs, back up into the sunlight. Anthy watches the place where she was, still holding the scarf. After a long moment, she picks up her suitcase again, and tucks the scarf inside. 

She turns back towards the tunnels, and takes in a breath.

Onward once again.


	16. Choosing

Anthy waits for the train for much longer than it should take for one to arrive. Not a single soul joins her on the platform, or at least, none that she can see. Sometimes, she thinks she sees a wisp of a person heading down the stairs, a cutout shape of a person floating to stand beside her on the tracks, but when she turns to look, there is nothing there.

She wonders if she has the wrong stop after all.

When her legs can no longer bear standing upright on the platform, when she thinks she’ll have to go and find another train station, something echoes in her ears.

Chuchu hears it before she does. His ears twitch against her cheek, and he sits upright from his nap, yawning. He turns his head back and forth, tail waving like a metronome as he searches for the sound. Then she hears it too.

She frowns. She cups a hand to her ear, trying to capture it. She knows she hears something, but what it is eludes her. She closes her eyes, focusing on nothing but the sound. It is something like...like a humming. A buzz of machinery, perhaps. Something echoing, bouncing off the walls of the train tunnel so that she can’t tell how far away it is, or where it is coming from. She opens her eyes with a frown. It is so faint and yet...something about it sets her teeth on edge. Her chest tightens. What is it she is feeling? What is this sound bringing over her?

Chuchu squeaks loudly, his tail shooting out straight like an exclamation point. Anthy turns at his surprise, lips parting.

Standing just on the tracks, beady eyes staring over the top of the platform, is a penguin. Anthy sucks in a breath.

As soon as she notices the penguin, it whips around. Faster than she would think possible for such an ungainly creature, it waddles off at full tilt down the right tunnel. Chuchu shrieks, leaps from her shoulder, and gives chase.

“Chuchu! Don’t run on the tracks!”

It’s too late. Chuchu has already disappeared into the darkness, and unless she wants to lose him, she must too. A brief panic overtakes her at the idea of being on this journey all alone — at never seeing Chuchu again. What would she do without him? How can she keep going without him?

Her feet move on their own, and she jumps onto the tracks, turning into the darkness. The tunnel gapes like a maw about to swallow her, but she heads Chuchu squeaking up ahead. She doesn’t hesitate before she passes into the darkness.

She only knows where she is by the feeling of her feet scrabbling over the train tracks, and the sound of Chuchu’s voice ahead of her.

And also the buzzing sound that slowly grows louder as she delves deeper into the tunnel.

A faint, dull light emerges from the darkness. It is cold and sterile, the washed out gray of a hospital room. She smells something like dust, that coats her throat and lungs, and makes her feel as though she will never take a clear breath again.

She approaches slowly, heels clicking on the tracks, until she arrives at the source.

A hole cracks open in the side of the wall, the dull gray light pouring from inside. Still, in the darkness, it is blinding, and she has to squint against it. Here, the sound of the buzzing is so loud it is overpowering, rattling in her teeth and bones. It is joined by the rumble of machines working beneath tiles, of air ducts clattering with the gusts that roll through them. It is an industrial sound unlike anything she’s ever heard.

Illuminated in the light of the broken hole in the wall is Chuchu. Her heart nearly goes out from the relief, and she drops her suitcase to scoop him up with both hands.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” she said, more sharply than she would have liked — but her heart is racing so fast.

Chuchu peeps apologetically, nuzzling her face. Then he points with his tail towards the hole, and she turns to face it again.

“Did the penguin go there?” she asks.

The penguins were the ones who had led her here, where she’d met Himari. Could it be that they were leading her somewhere else, as well? Were these penguins somehow the guides, or the messengers, of the world she had found herself in?

Chuchu shook his head, but he still points. She frowns. She still feels on edge, still trembles slightly from the fear of Chuchu’s disappearance, and from the anxiety that the sound of the factory pumps through her.

But she leans forward anyway, morbid curiosity overcoming her. 

Her eyes adjust slowly to the light. It’s hard to see. She puts Chuchu back onto her shoulder, and grabs hold of her suitcase. Biting her lip, she hesitates. But...she has no other clues. Why had the penguin led them here?

Taking a deep breath, she steps through the hole in the wall.

Inside, her eyes adjust more quickly. Dull sunlight pours through the large windows high above her, washed out by the dusty window panes. Huge industrial fans turn slowly, humming with a constant moan. And there are conveyor belts — hundreds of them, rising up so far above her head that she can’t see all of them. They are the source of buzzing, she thinks. Her eyes drop to the floor below, and she squints. Are those...people?

She can’t make out faces. It’s like they’re nothing more than blank paper cutouts in the shape of people, the shape of  _ small _ people — children. Children hugging their knees to their chests, sitting along and scattered on the factory floor, waiting...for what?

Anthy frowns. She steps forward, and when she blinks, she finds she is standing on the factory floor, among the children. She looks around, brow furrowing at the faceless children, the blur that seems to overtake her eyes as she tries to focus on any one of them.

There’s...a heaviness here. Something that presses down on her chest, makes every breath a struggle to inhale and release. Something about it is familiar, in a way that sinks into her stomach like a leaden weight, like she’s breathing through air made of metal.

She turns to the closest child, and crouches near them.

“Where are we?” she asks. “What is this place?”

The child does not answer — or at least, she cannot tell if it is the child she addresses who answers. Instead, the answer seems to come from somewhere indistinguishable, from a face she can’t make out in the crowd.

“We are in the Child Broiler.”

The name sends a shudder down Anthy’s spine. What sort of place is this? She stands up straight, suddenly afraid again. She can’t remember the last time she felt so afraid — fear was one of the first emotions she had lost, one of the first feelings she had stuffed deep into herself, buried under numbness.

“Why are you here?” she whispers, her throat thin.

“Because no one wants us.”

“Because we aren’t needed.”

“Because we aren’t chosen.”

But this place — it fills her with fear. And suddenly she knows the heaviness, she remembers it, and she knows why she is afraid.

It’s the feeling of hopelessness.

The ground shudders beneath her feet, and she cries out, nearly dropping to her knees. The floor starts to rumble, and then she does drop to her knees, barely catching herself on her hands. Above her, she hears the whir of a moving platform, bearing a person with a megaphone across the ceiling.

“The Child Broiler is now online,” the person announces. “We will grind you into dust now.”

The ground lurches again, bucks beneath her hands and knees, and she realizes that she is on a conveyor belt. The children around her sit perfectly still as the belt lurches them along. She can see down so far below — when did she get so far up?

And below...

The metallic hum and whir of the blades grips her like hands, crunching in around her as she stares down into their faraway jaws. She watches as the paper children tumble one after the other inside, and hears them shatter, their glass fragments scattering the floor below.

“Don’t be afraid. It doesn’t hurt. You will only become invisible.”

Anthy can’t breathe. Her mouth is like dust. All around her, children sit immobile, unmoving. Headed towards their fate without even a breath. The megaphone continues to issue announcements in a cold, echoing voice. And still, the blades hum. And still, the glass shattered.

“You will only become invisible.”

Anthy’s hands are smaller than she remembers. Her hair is shorter. She feels smaller, like she takes up less space. She stares into the blades far below like it hypnotizes her. Like it brings her back to someplace that no longer exists.

“You will only become invisible.”

How easy would it be, to fall? To close her eyes and never think another thought again? To never feel another fear ever again, to never remember another memory that left her torn and impaled with the memory of swords?

She had wished to become invisible, once, she realizes. Once, she would have done anything to disappear.

Anthy crunches in on herself, a child again, clad in nothing but a red slip. She wants to close her eyes, to curl into a ball until she disappears. No more swords. No more hands. No more screaming in her head. Nothing but blessed silence, and nothingness.

“Don’t give up!”

The words are so distant, so faint, she barely hears them.

“If you think you have nothing left to live for, you’re wrong!”

It’s a different voice. Her ears twitch, catch onto it.

“Take my hand! You deserve to be visible, no matter who has rejected you!”

Anthy lifts her head, her vision slowly starting to clear.

“There is someone, even one person, who wants to see you again in this world!”

Anthy’s eyes snap open. She is standing, she is awake, she is holding her suitcase and Chuchu is screaming in her ear as she realizes that her hands are the normal size again, her hair is long, she is herself. The memories skitter around her, threatening to drag her into the blades, but she steps back, moving back so that the conveyor cannot throw her into them.

She doesn’t know where the voice came from. It seemed to come from everywhere. But it woke her up. It reminded her.

_ I can’t disappear _ , she thinks, a sudden burst of determination flooding her.  _ I can’t disappear! _

_ Utena is waiting for me! _

It takes effort. Her legs burn. But she walks backward, trying to fight against the conveyor belt. Lifeless paper children continue to move past her, and for the first time, she thinks she can see glimpses of them, of the people they are beneath the hopelessness that has sapped them of all color.

“Wake up,” escapes her lips. “Open your eyes.”

She feels the words bubbling up in her chest, the desperate desire to release them. Words press against her lungs, choking her. 

She sees herself in every face. The abandoned children shine her mirror image back at her, the her who had thought herself abandoned by the world. What would she have wanted to hear? What would she have wanted someone to say?

“Don’t give up,” she whispers. “Don’t give up — on this world where we can finally meet.”

A child stirs. She lifts her head. The paper silhouette begins to fade, and Anthy can see the edges of her, the girl who had once existed underneath. Did Anthy’s words reach her?

The girl’s eyes find Anthy’s. Anthy needs to reach out. She needs to do something. She needs to...to what? Her hand lifts out.

The girl is so close to the edge of the conveyor belt. She still stares at Anthy, the edges of her starting to turn back to white. Anthy’s throat dries.

And then, a hand snakes out.

“Take my hand,” a voice calls. “If you want to leave this place, take my hand!”

The girl tips over the edge. Her eyes widen. Anthy almost screams. 

Then the girl reaches out. She grabs hold. The pale hand squeezes back, and then yanks.

Anthy opens her eyes, and she is back on the tracks. Behind her, the Child Broiler hums on.

“Are you all right?”

A soft hand touches her face, and Anthy breathes for the first time. She fills her lungs with greedy air, overwhelming herself with the cool scent of the train tunnel to dislodge the dust in her lungs.

When her eyes clear, she sees the girl, first. She is small, black-haired, and wide-eyed, staring up at Anthy. And beside her, a hand gripping hers, is a woman. She is taller than Anthy, pale, with long blond hair and the smooth face of one who has often been called beautiful.

There is kindness in her eyes, though, and at her side stands a man, bespectacled and rumpled. He holds another child in his arms, who also stares at Anthy with the impropriety only a child can have.

“What... happened?” Anthy finally breathes.

The woman smiles at Anthy.

“I’m Yuri,” she says. “Tabuki Yuri. This is my husband, Tabuki Keiju.”

She gestures to the man, who smiles and nods at her. Anthy still trembles.

“What  _ was _ that,” she asks again, more desperate. This is beyond her understanding. Even the world she had crafted, the terrors she had seen — there was something in that room that terrified her. Something that had nearly overtaken her.

Yuri smiles sadly, and Tabuki closes his eyes a moment.

“That was the Child Broiler,” Tabuki says, finally. “Where children who aren’t chosen go.”

Anthy’s heart rattles in her ribs, and she tries to breathe. Yuri puts a hand on Tabuki’s arm as though to comfort him, and when he opens his eyes again, meets Anthy’s...she lets out a breath. She understands, then. He has been there, too. He, too, has been there as a child, left alone and feeling the hopelessness, the abandonment. She lets her heart return to normal.

“I don’t understand,” she says, softly.

“I don’t know that anyone does,” Yuri says, just as softly. “But Keiju and I...”

She inhales, and exhales.

“We go back,” she says. “As often as we can. We reach out to those who will take our hands. We shout to those who won’t. We hope they’ll hear us.”

“Why?”

The question is barely more than a whisper. Anthy can’t even imagine it. Escaping a place such as that, and...returning? Over and over again? 

Anthy couldn’t even reach out to one person, the way she’d been reached out to. She couldn’t even reach out to one person.

Yuri smiles that soft smile again, exchanging a look with Tabuki — it’s one of softness. Of a kind love that Anthy has never truly seen before.

“Because it’s what we can do,” Tabuki says. “Because it’s what someone very special did for us.”

“Because an abandoned child needs to know just one thing,” Yuri says. “That they are capable of being loved.”

She smiles at the girl who’s hand she holds, then looks up at Anthy. She releases the girl and steps forward, taking Anthy’s free hand in both of hers.

“It was brave of you to enter,” she said. “To say something.”

Anthy tenses up. Another new feeling rises up within her, one that she has trouble identifying, one that was locked away along with the feeling of fear until now. She thinks it might be...frustration.

“I didn’t do anything,” she says. “I never did anything.”

Yuri only smiles, shaking her head.

“You said something,” she said. “Sometimes, that’s what it takes. Just a kind word.”

She inhales a long, low breath. Then she holds Anthy’s hand a little tighter, and holds her eyes.

“We can’t save them all, either,” Yuri says, softly. “We can’t save any of them, really.”

She cups Anthy’s hand, and Anthy can see that burns that cover her wrists and the backs of her hands, wispy and immaterial, as though they are the mere ghosts of wounds, the concept of pain more than the actuality of it. She wonders where they came from.

“But we...”

Anthy’s heart squeezes, and she knows the answer Yuri is going to give her.

“But you can reach out your hand,” Anthy finishes for her, her voice barely over a whisper, as though speaking too loudly might dislodge the lump rising in her throat. “And you can wait for them to grab hold.”

Yuri’s lips part. Then she smiles. She squeezes Anthy’s hand in both of hers.

“So you’ve seen it too,” she says.

It is all she says. It is all she needs to say. Anthy’s hand burns with the memory of fingers locked into hers, the ghostly burn of a hand that had once clung to her like she was the last thing in the world. When Yuri releases her, she can still feel it, though when she turns her fingers to her eyes, she sees none of the same ghostly marks on Yuri’s hands. It is nothing more than a memory

“Not all of them will grab hold,” Tabuki says, hefting the sleeping child into his arms. “But as long as we keep shouting, maybe someday...”

His eyes lift back, to the hole in the wall, to the echo of the blades humming and the glass shattering.

“Perhaps the invisible will remember somewhere inside themselves,” he says, “and they’ll learn to become visible again.”

Anthy looks to him, and he meets her eyes. He is young in appearance, but his eyes have the age of one who has seen more than they should have. Anthy wonders if her eyes shine the same knowledge back to him, if he knows how much older she is than the face she projects, than the veil she uses to drape over the things she’s seen. Frustration rises in her again.

“Does that happen often, you think?” she asks, more wondering aloud than asking for an answer.

But Tabuki smiles.

“Perhaps you ought to ask yourself,” he says.

Yuri steps back, taking the hand of the little girl beside her, who stares at Anthy with the open, wide-eyed gaze that only a child can muster. Anthy tries to smile for her. The girl does not smile back. She only stares. But...perhaps...perhaps she will make it. She left the Broiler, after all. Whether or not Anthy did anything, she doesn’t know if she knows. But...it’s a good feeling, knowing that at least one child has escaped. For a moment, she sees her own face in the girl again. Small, alone, afraid. But...Anthy escaped, too.

_ May you live and be loved _ , is all Anthy can think, as Yuri inclines her head and Tabuki bobs a half bow with the child still in his arms, and the pair turn wordlessly the opposite direction down the tracks. It’s as though they know she has a mission, and they have one of their own. Some goodbyes don’t need words.  _ May you always know that you are loved. _

Her eyes bubble with sudden, unbidden tears. She presses her finger and thumb into her eyes. Chuchu squeaks, softly, his tail brushing at her half formed tears. She smiles, and looks at him. She strokes his head with one finger.

“May I remember that as well,” she whispers, a silent blessing on herself. A quiet wish, or a prayer.

No, she thinks, turning back to the rails. A promise.


End file.
